Static!

by Michael R Collings

  One settled recumbent into the curve where Cathy’s lower lip had been. The other lay rigidly on top of the first.

  He leaned even closer now.

  The figures shifted again, became denser, fleshier...became recognizable forms.

  Human forms.

  More than that….

  He screamed!

  What had been sexual play transmuted into vicious assault and acute physical pain—into torture. The curving figure attacked the recumbent one, plunging fists again and again into unresisting flesh. Pools of darkness flowed from the body across a sandy nothingness until they surrounded the figures and clouded Payne’s vision. He jerked backwards, away from them.

  Cathy was gone. Never was, had never been, never could be.

  All that remained was the wilderness of sand and heat. And the distant twining figures.

  And the blood.

  He urged himself closer, unwilling to move but unable not to. Walking was painful, the soles of his feet pressed against burning sandpaper. A wave broke upon him from behind, stunningly and savagely, with such ferocity that it spun him forward. He stumbled across the sand toward the black boulders, his body merging sweat with sea saltiness. The static bellowed, blinding him as the figures exploded in a whirlwind of white and black tinged with red and finally resolving into white as….He sat bolt upright on the white bed in the white-walled room, panting. His skin was slick with sticky sweat.

  The monitor glowered down at him like a blank white face tinged with scarlet. He stared at it, blinked twice, sharply.

  There was nothing there.

  Nothing but a monitor displaying the staticky gray that always signaled the end of a disc.

  Everything was okay.

  He was in his room, his own hot and stuffy bedroom, his body exhausted from the day’s stress.

  Now the screen was blank, not even marred by snow.

  That was all.

  He pulled the edge of the towel from under himself and rubbed it against his forehead and chest, then lower, discovering with sudden inexplicable shame the wet stickiness on his abdomen.

  He dried himself, wadded the towel up and threw it into a corner. It lay coiled like a dusky gray serpent, staring at the thinner, darker one still unmoving on his dresser.

  “God,” he whispered, “what a nightmare.”

  He stretched his hand out in front of him. His fingertips trembled. His knuckles were white. He stood and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  As he waited for the water to flow, he looked over his shoulder. In its corner, the monitor hissed gently at him, dying as the DVD player automatically turned itself off. The disc—whatever it had been—would be unmoving, still, ready for the next screening.

  Payne stepped under the cold needles of water, drenching away the fear and the panic and the shame along with the sweat and the heat. He didn’t try to analyze what had happened.

  It was a bad dream.

  That was all.

  Nothing more. In the corner, hidden by the faded shower curtain, the monitor stared blankly, silently.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When the telephone shrilled the first time, Nick’s bedroom light was burning but he was asleep. It took him a few seconds to wake and orient dully on the telephone, a few more to stumble over and lift the receiver to his ear. Sixth ring. He squinted at the clock to see what time it was but it was turned away from him.

  “Hullo,” he mumbled his throat thick with sleep. His teeth felt gritty where his tongue rubbed against them.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah.” The answer was punctuated by a yawn.

  “Payne.” This time there was something in the voice—a tone, an edge that startled Nick instantly awake.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Well...the...nothing, really. You’re usually up late. Hope I didn’t disturb you. You weren’t asleep, were you?”

  Nick blinked. He noticed consciously for the first time that the light was still on. The book he had been reading lay face down on the floor, one page crumbled against the braid of the throw rug. He had apparently drifted off and let the book slide. He leaned over and turned the clock on his nightstand around until he could see the face.

  Two a.m.

  Shit, what does he think I was doing at this time of the night!

  “Uh, no,” he said. Like so many others, he suffered from an irrational but tenacious hesitance about letting others know that he slept occasionally; here it was, two a.m., and he couldn’t admit over the phone that he had been far gone into Night-Night-Land. “I was just reading. Trying to get through Spenser.”

  Payne laughed. It sounded hollow to Nick.

  There was a long pause before Payne spoke again.

  “Uh, Nick, want to...look, I know it’s late and all, but could you come over? For a while? We can watch a movie or something.”

  Nick didn’t want to. He knew that.

  And it went beyond the hour or his sleepiness (which had evaporated at the sound of Payne’s voice) or his need to study. He simply didn’t want to go over there tonight. But in a sense he really had no choice. Beneath Payne’s words swirled icy currents of fear and despair—Nick didn’t know why, but he had seen and felt enough about that house to understand Payne’s need.

  “Okay, yeah,” he said finally. “Sure. Give me a couple of minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a click, silence, then that irritating, almost subliminal buzzing of a telephone suddenly cut off.

  Well, Nick old boy, you’re in for it now. That house in the dead of night.

  The dead of night.

  The phrase chilled his spine as he stood there almost naked, telephone in hand, and stared at the darkness that loomed outside where he knew Payne’s house stood but where nothing could be distinguished from the unbroken blackness.

  And here you go, traipsing over to The Greer...to Payne’s, he corrected himself, wondering why he had slipped. He hadn’t thought of her in days (yes you have don’t lie not to yourself not just yet), and besides Payne probably just had a fight or something with his girl and wanted someone to talk to.

  He dressed quickly. The night was warm, so he pulled on worn shorts and a T-shirt, slipped his feet into a pair of old beach thongs that huddled by the bedroom door.

  He could feel the coolness of damp grass curling up to brush at his toes and the sides of his feet as he crossed the lawn. In seconds, the soles of the thongs were damp and cold. Outside, the night was considerably cooler than it had been inside; moist fingers caressed his arms and legs. By the time he reached Payne’s, he was even slightly chilled.

  He started up the steps, walking carefully as the thin rubber soles slipped on worn wood. First step, second Remember Hill House where something walked but not alone third the Marsten House fourth The House Beyond the Hill and he was on the porch itself, stifled in the sudden closeness that cut out stars and sky and hesitant breaths of night air.

  He crossed the porch, shivering once.

  Screeee.

  As he passed the porch glider, the seat dropped back an inch. It’s the wind, he thought.

  Screeee.

  The hinges squeaked miserably a third time, screeee, squealing as if the cool dampness had created instant rust and the metal were wearing against itself in an insane attempt to ward away an intrusion. His mind flickered to an odd image—someone, Dame Judith Anderson perhaps, playing Lady Macbeth in an ancient black-and-white film he saw once in class. She was rubbing her hands together, fingers splayed, tendons taut and pulling across the back of her hands like piano wires. She scraped palm against palm, uselessly, anxious to remove bloody stains that only she could see. The movement matched the painful squeak of the porch glider, back and forth, back and forth.

  A light flared inside the house and Nick realized that he had been standing on the porch for a long time. He didn’t have a watch to check, but an internal monitor warned him that minutes—many minutes—had passed. The swing was silent
and still, so massive at the end of its heavy chain that it looked as if it would never, could never move.

  He shuddered...from the cold he assured himself, and reached for the doorbell. He paused. He didn’t want to touch that buzzer. Didn’t want to disturb it as it stared at him from its monk’s cowl of dark metal—a tiny black knot gleaming in the light. The buzzer startled and intimidated. Without bothering to ask himself why ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies he rapped sharply on the door.

  “Payne?” he called out. The question was useless in a sense, since he knew Payne was expecting him, and anyway who else would be there?

  “It’s Nick!” Again useless. Who else could it be?

  Payne opened the door so quickly and quietly that he must have been standing behind it waiting for Nick. His skin was flushed, his face damp and his hair slicked back as if he had just stepped from the shower and pulled a comb through it without waiting to dry it first. The shower image was emphasized by the white towel he had cinched around his waist. He wore nothing else. He had been in the sun a lot during the summer, Nick noted abstractedly. Payne’s skin gleamed dark and richly golden against the whiteness of the towel, except for his chest and shoulders and face where the tan was suffused with a blush of red. Payne seemed not to notice or care how he was dressed.

  “Uh...,” Nick stammered, unaccountably taken aback. He shouldn’t have been, perhaps. It was late after all. Maybe Payne and the girl had been...maybe he was so upset that he didn’t think about changing. But the wet hair, the shower, the flush....

  “Come on in,” Payne said, rushing the words as if he wanted to close the door against the night.

  Nick stopped thinking and reacted. He stepped in.

  The house was mercilessly bright. Every light seemed to be burning furiously and the white walls glowed with an inner iridescence more their own than reflected from the bulbs. The TV screen in the living room wall was playing something in grainy black and white but Nick couldn’t tell what. In the middle of the room, the chess set gleamed starkly, shadows spilling in distorted shapes across the gray squares. Nick shivered again, even though the house was warm, almost hot.

  Payne didn’t notice. He motioned for Nick to sit down.

  “Not in here, okay?” Nick said suddenly. “How about the kitchen or the film room?”

  Payne looked at Nick curiously, questioning and...and something else.

  “It’s too bright,” Nick said, clutching at an obvious excuse that made more sense than the real reason—he couldn’t bring himself to say that he simply did not want to stay in that living room, surrounded by what abruptly seemed like unlimited acres of glowing white.

  Payne’s eyes flickered and Nick saw an unreadable something (Payne/pain) in them. He shivered again and held his arms tightly against his chest.

  “Must be a draft in here,” he said apologetically.

  Payne shook his head, seriously, denying even the possibility of such a thing.

  “Not a crack, not a breath,” he said.

  He led the way into the kitchen anyway. As they passed the bedroom door, Payne disappeared for a moment, then reappeared carrying an old terry-cloth robe.

  “Here,” he said. “You look cold.” He slipped the robe over Nick’s shoulders. “Your skin’s like ice.”

  “Thanks,” Nick said. The robe felt good. He had gotten more of a chill than he had thought. His toes tingled and the thongs were like thin sheets of snow.

  They continued into the kitchen. From the silver bars of light cutting beneath the doors in the hallway, Payne must have had every light in the house on. Nick could imagine the electric meter hanging beside the outside back door, its disc spinning in crazy confusion at having to deliver so much power in the middle of the night. Yet from the outside, the house had seemed unbroken blackness. The drapes again, those eerily effective, unnerving, light-consuming drapes.

  The kitchen was preternaturally bright also, maybe because Nick knew that outside only the stars and the focused glow of streetlights perched like vultures on concrete pillars punctuated the night. Inside, it was as if Payne were trying to kill all shadows, pierce their vitals with shards of light until they had bled out their essences and there was nothing left to bleed out but whiteness reflecting whiteness—except Payne’s own body, a harsh intrusion of darkness and life and color in the room, itself bisected by the startling white of the bath towel.

  Nick felt uncomfortable in his ragged, stained cut-offs and color-spattered shirt, the fading reminder of a weekend art-fair in Summerland, a sleepy place up the coast near Santa Barbara. Even its faded colors seemed to burn against his skin, pressed inward by the overwhelming whiteness.

  He pulled the robe closed. It had once been tan—he could see hints of original color preserved in the seams but it had worn to a soft ivory, almost white, that blended better with the room.

  They sat down. The monitor in the kitchen was on also, apparently playing the same film, although Nick still had no idea what it was. They sat for a while, occasionally glancing at the TV screen, at the bare walls, at everything except each other.

  For a while Nick watched Payne but every time Payne raised his eyes and met Nick’s, he turned away as if burned. The flush would creep up his neck again and the room would seem to grow hotter.

  “What’s wrong?” Nick finally asked.

  Payne paused before answering.

  In spite of the lateness of the night and Nick’s discomfort at being there, he still thought he had a pretty fair idea of what Payne would probably say. A fight, a spat with his girl. Maybe she had stayed over and in the middle of in the middle of things it had gone wrong and she had stormed out, leaving him...unsatisfied and frustrated.

  Something like that. So Nick figured that he would be ready for whatever Payne finally came out with. It really couldn’t be anything else.

  But he was wrong. Nick could not have anticipated what Payne would say. Not at past two in the morning, sitting in a kitchen that seemed to have klieg lights screwed into every sixty-watt socket, in a house brighter than midday, not talking with a man draped only in a damp towel as they watched some unnamed film dancing across one of half a dozen screens.

  “I’ve been having some trouble with the televisions,” Payne announced flatly.

  Nick glanced up at the screen, back at Payne.

  Nick started to laugh, then stifled the sound before it was born. The man was serious! Payne was staring intently at Nick, his eyes belying the surface neutrality of his voice. Nick wanted to say something about the inappropriateness of the time and the place, something inane and obvious, but he couldn’t.

  Payne turned toward the monitor. He was immobile except for the blood pulsing through the veins of his neck and temples and for his right hand as it curled and uncurled along the fraying edge of the towel. His jaws were tensed; bunched muscles stood out against his cheeks like cordwood against a weather-stained wooden wall. This wasn’t the time for a joke or a stupid comment, Nick decided. Whatever it was that Payne really wanted to talk about, he certainly wasn’t joking.

  “What kind of trouble?” Nick finally whispered.

  That seemed to break whatever spell Payne was under. Or at least bend it. Payne looked at Nick. Nick could see the stiffness drain from muscles, trouble drain from tired, glazed eyes, to be replaced with self-consciousness and embarrassment.

  “Nothing really,” Payne said, his old voice infusing the kitchen with warmth and concern. “I guess.... Just...I guess you could call it a double exposure. I thought I saw two...shows”—he stumbled over the word, as if it had not been his first choice—“two shows at once. It was eerie. Would you mind watching to see if you notice anything unusual?”

  It was an odd request. Nick understood without further words that there was more to it than Payne had admitted. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask, to pry openly into Payne’s secrets. Instead he simply nodded.

  “Sure,” he said softly. “But not in here. It’s too bright.”


  He fidgeted slightly. “And this chair’s digging into my back.”

  Payne laughed, a curiously fresh sound. “Got it. How about the TV room.” As if every room in the place wasn’t a TV room.

  Nick nodded.

  They went down the hall and into the front study—by consensus the official viewing room. Again, all of the lights burned feverishly but Payne dimmed them immediately. Nick dropped into his usual chair, stretching to make himself comfortable. Payne sat on the near end of the couch—an odd choice for him since he almost always sat at the opposite end. He seemed to need to be near someone tonight, Nick thought. Once or twice, coming out of the kitchen, Payne had accidentally rubbed against Nick, shoulder to shoulder, arm against arm, as if to assure himself that Nick (or perhaps he) were real.

  “Want to watch anything In particular?”

  Nick shook his head. “Can’t think of anything. Whatever’s on. It should be enough to make sure the system’s working all right.”

  Payne settled back into the couch. He seemed more himself although still nervous.

  “Say, wasn’t someone, that Mr.—what was his name anyway?—supposed to fix the thing?” Nick said suddenly, speaking into the silence.

  “Yeah,” Payne said, his voice small and absent as he stared at the screen as if afraid that at any moment it would transmogrify into some horrendous Creature from the Black Cutting-Room-Floor.

  “Someone was here, left a note. Said they couldn’t find anything wrong. But there is. Just watch.”

  Nick watched, splitting his time and attention between Payne and the screen. Payne seemed not to notice that Nick was watching him. His hand still rubbed occasionally against the selvage on the towel, the fingers stiff and knotted, almost arthritic, although Nick hadn’t known that Payne had any trouble like that. He had not mentioned anything, at any rate. Maybe the hand was just stiff from something he had done earlier that day, overextending the fingers and wrist working in the yard perhaps. That happens sometimes, Nick knew…you work so hard at pulling shrubs or heavy weeds that your hands and wrists swell and it hurts even to move them.