Static!

by Michael R Collings

  “What are you doing?” This time it was more a demand than a question.

  “Got to get home,” he said.

  “Why? Can’t you....”

  “No! I’ve got to get home.” He grabbed his shoes and socks and opened the bedroom door.

  “I can’t explain it,” he said in an attempt at placating her. “I’ve just got to get home.”

  And with that he was gone.

  As soon as he pulled up in front of his place an hour later, he knew that his feelings had been right. Something was wrong. There was a van parked by the curb. Tasco’s van. It should have left long before.

  He killed his engine, jumped from the car, and ran up the steps.

  The front door was locked. He rattled it but it felt secure. No one had broken in, at least not this way.

  He glanced around and saw the remains of the two envelopes scattered on the porch. He fished out his own key and opened the door.

  It was dark inside, pitch black, and the air was heavy with an unfamiliar odor, oily and coppery and ashy all combined into something that made Payne’s stomach lurch. He rushed in, hitting the light switch as he did so.

  Just inside the door, he stopped.

  He was a fool, he realized, for running in like that. If there was a thief and he was still in the house, Payne had just set himself up as a perfect target. He could get killed.

  He backed into the entryway and listened.

  Nothing. Not a sound.

  “Hey, anyone in there?” he called.

  Still nothing. No footsteps, no slamming of the back door.

  “I’m armed and I’m coming in,” he called again, his voice echoing through the house. He looked around the edge of the entryway into the living room. Everything seemed in order. He crossed the living room, went down the hall, opening doors as he went. Everything seemed to be as he had left it.

  Except the kitchen.

  One of the DVD consoles sat on the kitchen table. Payne hurried into the control room and breathed a sigh of relief. Everything else was there except the unit Tasco was repairing and the one on the table. For an instant, he considered forgetting the whole thing, then he realized that even though there had been no robbery, something strange must have happened. The damned truck was still parked out front. His equipment had been moved. And there was that lingering odor and the greasy feeling in the air as he breathed.

  He went straight to the telephone and called the police.

  They arrived within fifteen minutes. He explained everything as best he could. They snooped through the house, opening doors and cabinets and drawers. They even called Cathy to check Payne’s own statement that he had come directly from her place.

  “Just routine,” one of the officers assured him, but after a while it almost seemed as if they suspected Payne of doing something, maybe wiping out Tasco’s man for the sadistic fun of it. Finally they came to a decision.

  “There’s really nothing we can do, Mr. Gunnison,” the officer said as he stood under the porch light and slipped a notebook back into his pocket. “There’s no sign of forced entry. You admit that you left a key under the mat.”

  “Stupid move,” the other cop muttered, but Payne elected to ignore him.

  “And nothing is missing,” the first continued, also choosing to ignore his partner’s remark.

  “Except, of course, one TV repairman,” Payne said.

  “Yes, there is that. But there’s no evidence that he was here long, or that he left under duress. We’ll contact Mr. Tasco about the truck

  “No good,” Payne said impatiently. “He’s out of town for the week. I don’t know where exactly. Someplace near San Diego.”

  “We’ll see what we can do to locate him,” the officer said, “and in the meantime we’ll get the truck towed away.”

  To impound it, Payne thought, but he didn’t care about that.

  He was tired and confused and frustrated. As he stood on the porch watching the cops leave and realized that dawn was breaking and that his shoulder and hip and knuckles hurt so badly that he would have to take at least three or four Excedrin this time to knock the pain down, he didn’t care about anything.

  He went inside and dropped onto his bed.

  He fell asleep almost immediately, so he missed the moment when the screen over his head flickered on to replay again and again and again the agonies and the intimacies of Ric’s death.

  Payne woke several hours later feeling unusually refreshed.

  He stretched and was relieved to find that all his joints moved easily, without any hint of pain.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  When Payne woke at 8:30, he wanted to talk to someone but there was no one. Nick was gone, had apparently been gone all night, certainly since before Payne himself got home. Nick’s car was not in the drive, the house was locked up and had that indefinable air of an empty place, even if the emptiness has lasted only an hour or so. Payne had no idea where Nick might have gone.

  That left Cathy but he was afraid to call her at all. After the fiasco with the film two nights before, and his running out on her last night—this morning, he corrected himself—any hopes he might have had of a deepening, even a continuing relationship with her seemed dim at best. He still wasn’t entirely certain why he had rushed away. All he could remember was that he had been lying half asleep next to her when the flash had come, so quickly and fragmentary that he could not tell precisely what it was. But it had impelled him to leave. Not even Cathy would be willing to take that explanation as excuse for the way he had behaved.

  Other than Nick and Cathy, there were only the lawyers, a mercenary lot who had apparently cared little for Aunt Emilia and now cared less for Payne. As a person. As a client, of course, he was number one on their hit parade and would remain until the last hint of legal complexity concerning the will was resolved. Sometime around the year 2020, Payne thought bitterly. But to call one of them at 8:30 in the morning and ask for help, even for a listening ear—that was patently impossible.

  For a long time, he moped around, sitting in a chair, slouching on the sofa, wandering into the kitchen for a drink, stopping to fix toast and eggs and wash up afterward and discover to his amazement that it was not yet nine and he only had most of the day stretching endlessly before him instead of all of it.

  He thought about working in the yard but could not bring himself to go out and drag the mower from its final resting place.

  He even thought about watching a film or two. But today he could not. The towering shelves of cases had no draw for him; or, rather, they seemed vaguely repellant, as if part of him were interested, part of him were not.

  The slack-eyed monitors made him nervous.

  He finally decided on finishing his laundry. He loaded soiled clothing into the washer, then watched it whish and swirl with the intensity of a mother hen whose chicks are about to leave the nest. He hung his things out on the line in the back yard, pinning the wooden clothes pins onto the material with a savagery that surprised and frightened him. He was glad when the chore was over and his clothes fluttered in the breeze like a neat line of ghosts waving poignant farewell to the living. White T-shirts, white socks, white sheets and pillowcases, white towels—hand and kitchen varieties.

  It wouldn’t be hard to learn to hate white, he thought. He remembered his mother’s clothesline as a riot of color even when she did whites, what with the pastel bands and prints on nearly everything. His eyes ached from that memory and from the glare of sunlight reflecting from his own wash.

  He went back into the kitchen and took two Excedrin. He swallowed them with a glass of water, remembering with shuddering horror and an acid flavor at the back of his throat the story Nick mentioned once about some guy who dry-swallowed them. Sure way to go crazy, Payne thought, grimacing from the bitter after-taste of the two pills.

  Another glance at the clock. 11:53. Almost half the day dead.

  He sat at the table in the kitchen, thinking about nothing in particular an
d drawing invisible arabesques with his forefinger on the flat white surface.

  12:15.

  He stood and walked over to the telephone and lifted the receiver and, before his better sense and his pride got in the way of simple decency, dialed Cathy’s number.

  Before it rang through, he set the receiver back on the hook and stepped away.

  After what seemed a long while, he lifted it again and dialed and dropped it back down with a clatter that echoed through the room.

  On the third try, he finally allowed the circuit to ring through. He listened through five rings, six, seven. At ten he would hang up.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  “Hello?” It was her voice. “This is Cathy Litton. Hello?”

  “Don’t hang up, Cathy,” he said, although that was not what he intended to say.

  She didn’t answer him but she didn’t hang up, either.

  “I’m sorry about last...this morning. I just got a feeling that...that something was wrong here at home. I couldn’t explain it and I didn’t want to say anything for fear that you would think I was crazy. But that was all. Really.”

  He waited for the passage of three heartbeats, then:

  “Cathy?”

  “Yes, Payne, I’m still here.”

  He took a deep breath. “Well, there was something wrong.”

  “I know. The cops called me, remember? Making sure you had been with me.”

  He heard a brittleness in her voice that bothered him.

  “I’m really sorry. Things have gotten out of hand. But believe me, I’m trying to take care of it. Really.” He heard a sharp intake of breath.

  “Are you all right,” she asked quickly.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. The robbery, or attempted robbery at least, was nothing. Some of the audio stuff was moved around. Nothing missing, though. I don’t quite know what happened. The police checked everything out and left and...”

  “Payne,” Cathy said, her voice soft and low. “Are you sure you’re all right. Are you telling me everything? You sound...strained. Tired.”

  “Tired,” he said with a curt laugh that punctuated the word. And then he realized that it was true. “Yeah. I’m tired. I haven’t had much sleep since I left your place. And”—come on let her know how you feel about her don’t keep it in any more she has a right to know—“I sure didn’t get much sleep there. Thanks to you. I…uh...I love you, Cathy.”

  His ears burned and his cheeks felt like flames. After all, she was beautiful and talented and clever and loving and probably had more boyfriends than she knew how to handle and he was only a stumbling idiot from back East who seemed to know how to get into more trouble with her than any single individual might be expected to manage.

  Well, if worse comes to worse and she laughs at me, I can always stay away from her part of Southern California. Keep most of LA’s millions between us.

  He waited for her answer.

  “Payne,” she began, and he knew how she would continue: “You’re a nice enough boy but...,” followed by a hundred and one reasons why he should never have been born. He felt like he did when he asked the most popular girl in his high school class to a movie: “No thanks. You’re a nice enough but....” He had been crushed but at least it had been good practice for what was to come this time. He braced himself.

  “Payne, I think I’m in love with you too. It’s just that you can be...well, that there are some things we need to talk about. Seriously. Can you come over tonight.”

  Can I come over—watch out for my dust! Watch me fly!

  “Sure. And Cathy....”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  She laughed. She didn’t even ask him what he was thanking her for—maybe he didn’t know for sure himself, but her response broke something and he laughed.

  They spoke for a few more minutes, then he hung up, slowly, almost sadly. The interlude has been wonderful, perfect. She had given him more and forgiven him more than he had a right to expect. Much more. He looked around the kitchen, at the white cabinets and refrigerator and walls.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the wash flapping on the line, wraith-like and insubstantial. The fluttering quickened and expanded until it seemed as if all he could see was white. He had driven through a snowstorm in Minnesota once during a Christmas vacation with a couple of cousins. They had been caught in a whiteout. Even that did not compare with the barren absoluteness that seemed crowding in on him at that moment.

  Suddenly he couldn’t stand not to take a physical action that would match the elation he felt inside, not to break through the veil of white that surrounded him and froze him and suffocated him, not to see color in the wilderness of white.

  Let there be color!

  He wrenched the refrigerator open and, after a glance up and down the shelves, grabbed the plastic squeeze bottle of catsup jammed securely behind the little silver railing on the inside of the door. He pulled the bottle out, up-ended it until the catsup had drained into the narrow neck and backed up against the lid, then opened the lid and shut the refrigerator door with a kick of his heel.

  He stood in the middle of the room and closed his eyes. Suddenly he flailed his arms in wide manic circles, laughing as his fingers squeezed the plastic bottle. Coldness and dampness splattered his face and he laughed again. He felt more coldness and dampness on his neck and arms. Then there was no more and the bottle made an empty sucking sound when he relaxed his grip.

  He stood for a moment, breathing so heavily that he was almost sobbing, inexplicably afraid to look. Finally he opened his eyes.

  The kitchen looked like a slaughterhouse. Every surface was stained with drops or blobs or masses of deep crimson where the catsup had been flung around. He had expected to see...well, to see life and energy, color and vitality. Instead, he saw only blood and death and the charnel house.

  He looked down. He was covered, head to foot with the stuff.

  Images from countless splatter films forced their way into his imagination. Friday the Thirteenth carried to the nth degree. Halloween ad infinitum. Slaughter This and Massacre That.

  He shuddered.

  He stripped out of his stained clothes and tossed them into the sink and filled the sink with cool water. He remembered from somewhere that hot water would lock the stains in. He squirted a capful of Ivory dish detergent into the water—even the bottle is white—and swirled it around with his fingertips until a scum of foam formed. The water was tinged with red and the tiny soap bubbles were frothy and pink, like a visible, last gasping breath of a man dying of tuberculosis. He shivered again but not from coldness.

  Leaving his clothes to soak, he looked around at the mess. He would have to clean it all up soon, before the catsup had a chance to dry. He remembered all too well how hard it could be to scrape catsup off plates that had sat overnight after hot-dog bashes during the summers at home.

  He sighed and started in.

  There were some old rags on the back porch. He wadded them up and used them to scrub the cabinets and the walls and the floor and the windows. He sponged the table clean, leaving pink soapy foam wherever the sponge passed. It must have taken him well over an hour before he was even close to finished.

  Most of the stuff was off the walls and floors when he ran out of rags. Everyone he could find was already sodden and red-stained. They lay lumped together on the concrete floor of the back porch, looking like a gigantic suppurating wound swollen with hot pus. The sight made him slightly nauseous.

  Only the windows were left to clean, though. He wrung the last rag as dry as he could, hoping that it would be absorbent enough to clean the red scum from the glass, but all it did was smear it and make the window look even filthier. The sunlight glared through the glass, bright and red-tinged.

  What he needed, he realized, was newspapers. That was a trick he remembered from home. The best way to get a window spotless was to finish drying it off with newsprint. The first time he heard about it he was
skeptical, but when he saw the results he was convinced. Something in the ink pulled the dirt off, something like that. He wasn’t sure how it worked, but he knew that it did. It left neither streaks nor a light powdering of tissue filaments.

  The only problem was that he didn’t have any newsprint.

  He did have something else, though. Plenty of it. Something that he wanted to get rid of anyway.

  He went into the bathroom and took a quick shower, rinsing off the thin layer of sticky catsup-and-soap that had settled on his skin while he cleaned. He toweled dry and pulled on a pair of cut-offs. He pulled a kitchen chair into the hall and stood on it to open the access into the attic.

  The box sat there, right where he had put it days before. He didn’t bother to climb into the attic—trying that from the chair would have been too precarious, since his shoulders barely cleared the opening and he had no desire to pull himself by brute force over the dust-caked rafters and up into the attic.

  Instead he balanced on his tiptoes long enough to pull open the box flaps and grab the top half dozen or so magazines. He dropped them at his feet without looking at where they fell and closed the flaps. He slid the access cover closed and stepped down from the chair. His bare foot slipped on one of the glossy surfaces and threw him off balance. He tumbled backwards, ending up on his side amidst a flurry of full-color photographs. For an instant he froze, seeing in one of the photographs a pose that must have been, for the photographer at least, identical to the one he had inadvertently taken. Except that he was clothed.

  He scrambled to his feet and stuffed the magazines into a disorderly pile and carried them, still without looking at them, into the kitchen. He dumped them unceremoniously onto the counter next to the sink and ripped a handful of pages from the first and crumpled them up and began rubbing away at the catsup-stained glass.

  Magazine paper didn’t work as well as newsprint. The glossy surface seemed to smudge and smear more than it cleaned. He tossed the sodden wad of paper into the trash can underneath the sink and ripped out another handful of pages.

  The same. They made only a marginal difference on the windows.