Community

by Graham Masterton

  ‘What?’ said Isobel.

  He yanked up his zipper but didn’t bother with his belt. ‘Goddamned peeping Tom – spying on us!’

  ‘I don’t believe it! Where?’

  He hopped and stumbled into the hallway, slid back the chain on the front door and threw it wide open. As he did so, he saw a man in a black coat running diagonally across the snow-covered front yard.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Come back here, you pervert!’

  He grabbed his walking-stick from the hallstand and started to go after him, even though he had no shoes on. As he did so, however, a black Escalade appeared around the curve, and slewed to a halt right in front of the house. Its passenger door was flung open from inside and the man in the black coat climbed into it.

  ‘Hey, stop!’ Michael yelled at him. ‘You come back here!’

  He swung himself across the front yard like a one-legged pirate, but he was too late. With a squeal of tires the Escalade drove away and disappeared around the next bend. He heard it drive into the distance and then there was silence. Nothing but the wind, and the frozen branches tapping.

  Michael walked back to the house, where Isobel was standing in the open doorway, her dress still unbuttoned but wrapped tightly around her.

  ‘I’ve seen those guys before,’ said Michael, as he closed the front door behind him. ‘They were watching the house the first time I came here with Doctor Connor. You don’t know who they are, do you? Have you ever seen them before?’

  ‘No. Never. Do you think he saw everything?’

  Michael followed her into the living room. He pulled a tissue out of the box on the side table, went up to her and wiped her face.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Probably. But I’m going to report them to the cops. Where’s the nearest police station, do you know?’

  ‘I have no idea at all. Weed, I should think.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll just dial nine-one-one.’

  He went across the room and picked up the phone. There was no dialing tone, only an intermittent crackling noise. He tried three or four times, but he still couldn’t get a connection.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe the lines are down,’ Isobel suggested.

  ‘You have a cell, don’t you? Mine got lost when I crashed.’

  ‘I don’t, no. I’ve never really needed one since I’ve been here.’

  ‘Great. So to all intents and purposes, we’re incommunicado. The only thing I can do is walk up to the clinic and talk to their security staff.’

  Isobel came up to him and put her arms around his neck, so that her dress fell open. She looked up at him and said, ‘You could leave it till tomorrow, couldn’t you? I mean, it’s quite a turn-on, don’t you think, that somebody was watching us?’

  Michael hesitated for a moment. But he was very tired, and his knees were aching, and his socks were cold and soaking wet.

  Isobel kissed him, twice, and then she said, ‘Come on, it’s late. It’s time we got some sleep.’

  Michael pried her arms away from his neck, walked over to window and pulled the blind all the way down.

  ‘Just in case they come back for an action replay,’ he told her.

  The next morning, less than five minutes into his therapy session, Catherine put down her clipboard and said, ‘What’s bothering you, Gregory? You’re not even trying.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Michael told her. ‘I’m kind of distracted, that’s all. Something happened last night and I’m going to have to talk to Kingsley Vane about it.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What was it?’

  He told her about the man in the black overcoat and the dark glasses looking in through the window, although he didn’t tell her what he and Isobel had been doing at the time.

  ‘I saw them that first day you took me around to meet Isobel. Do you have any idea who they are?’

  ‘Yes – yes, I do. They’re security.’

  ‘Security? Come on, Catherine, there’s a difference between security and spying. We were sitting on the couch and the guy was peering right in through the window. If he’d wanted to check up on us, he should have knocked on the door and asked us if everything was OK.’

  ‘Well, I agree with you there. But some of the people who live in Trinity need very careful looking after, as you can imagine.’

  ‘The guy ran off! I went out to ask him what he was doing and he was off like a goddamned rabbit!’

  ‘He probably didn’t want any kind of confrontation, that’s all. Like I say, some of the people who live in Trinity are less than stable, physically or mentally or both. He wouldn’t have wanted to make your condition worse than it is already.’

  ‘In that case he should stay the hell away from our windows.’

  Catherine picked up her clipboard again. ‘If you like, I’ll talk to Kingsley Vane for you – just to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. By the way, how are you and Isobel Weston getting along? Do you think you’re going to enjoy staying with her?’

  From the way she looked at him, over her reading-glasses, Michael had the distinct feeling that she already knew what had happened between them. Or guessed it, anyhow. She was a highly trained psychotherapist, and people who have enjoyed a passionate night of love-making always find it hard to hide.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘She’s a very interesting woman, isn’t she? Really knows her onions when it comes to writers and books and stuff like that.’

  Catherine gave him an enigmatic smile, as if to say if only you knew.

  ‘What?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Catherine. ‘Let’s get back to these memory exercises, shall we? Try to think what your first pet was, and what you called it.’

  EIGHT

  The sky that afternoon was as gray as gunmetal, and a light snow began to fall. All the same, Michael took a walk around the streets. He was not only obeying Doctor Hamid’s instructions to take regular physical exercise, he was also trying to get a handle on this ‘convalescent community’ called Trinity and understand why people would choose to live here.

  Some of them were obviously TSC outpatients, and had to stay until their rehabilitation was complete, but Isobel had suggested that others had no choice. If that were true, why? What would make it obligatory for anybody to stay in a God-forgotten place like this, when Redding, the county capital, was little more than an hour away, and Sacramento and San Francisco less than five?

  He walked past the wide snow-covered recreation area, and then down the slope past the community center. He was breathing hard by the time he reached the top of the slope on the other side, and his left knee was beginning to ache. He stopped for a few moments to rest. There was nobody else in sight. No vehicles rolled past. The whole community was silent as if everybody was sleeping.

  As he started walking around the next curve, however, he thought he heard a repetitive chipping sound. He walked on further, and the sound grew louder, and echoed from the houses opposite. Passing a long hedge of laurels, he came to one end of a loop. In front of the second house on the left, a silver Enclave was parked, with snow on its roof. Immediately behind it he saw Jack Barr, in a woolly hat with ear flaps and a thick padded jacket and ski boots. He was using a broad-bladed shovel to chip the ice from the driveway.

  ‘Jack!’ he called out, as he approached.

  Jack looked up. He didn’t seem to recognize Michael at first, but then he said, ‘Dude! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just taking a walk, that’s all.’

  Jack looked around. ‘Taking a walk?’ he said, as if that were the strangest thing he had ever heard of. ‘The folks around here don’t take walks. So far as I can see, they don’t take drives, neither. In fact they don’t never seem to go no place at all, apart from the clinic.’

  ‘Well, you know what I said yesterday, about Trinity being not much different from any other small community? Something happened last night and it’s really made me change my mind.�
��

  He told Jack about the security man peering in through the window, although again he didn’t mention what he and Isobel had been doing when they were being spied on.

  ‘That is not good, man,’ said Jack. ‘That is not good at all. That is, like, sinister.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. The longer I stay here in Trinity, and the more I find out about it, the less I understand it.’

  ‘Well, me neither,’ said Jack. ‘But like you said yesterday, everybody seems real friendly. OK – there was that one girl screaming her head off, but the rest of them don’t seem like they’re nuts or nothing. They’re not some wacky religious sect, are they, like the Church of the Holy UFOs, or some bunch of neo-Nazis, with a secret stock of weapons? They seem flush-centered enough. Maybe they’re just too flush-centered.’

  Michael said, ‘No, Jack. They’re not. Living in a place like this isn’t flush-centered. There’s nothing here – no church, no post office, no market – nothing. It feels like it’s almost completely cut off from the outside world. Sure, some of the residents have to stay here because they’re having continuing treatment from the clinic. But the rest of them … what are they all doing here? I mean, would you live here, if you hadn’t had your accident, and you weren’t convalescent? I sure as hell wouldn’t.’

  Jack sniffed and then wiped his nose on the back of his gray woolly glove. ‘I guess not. And I have noticed something. Maybe I’m dumb, but everything that everybody says to me seems to make some kind of sense when they say it, but when I think about it afterward, I think hunh? It’s like somebody gives you a jigsaw but none of the pieces fit together, if you know what I mean.’

  At that moment the front door of the house opened and a man of about sixty appeared, wearing a long camel-hair coat and green rubbers. His long white hair flew up in the wind as he came down the driveway, smiling.

  ‘How it’s going, neighbor? I saw you at the community meeting, didn’t I, but I didn’t get the opportunity to introduce myself. Bill Endersby.’

  ‘Greg Merrick,’ said Michael, taking off his glove and shaking hands. ‘Good to know you, Bill.’

  ‘Looks like you’re making great progress there, Jack!’ said Bill Endersby. ‘Trouble is, when that snow melts, and then it freezes over again, and then the procedure repeats itself nightly, what you have is your naturally occurring skateway.’

  ‘So, where are you heading off to?’ Michael asked him.

  Bill Endersby frowned at him as if he had said something in a foreign language. Under his flyaway white hair, he was a very thin man, with a colorless, wrinkled face and pink, watery eyes. His nose was upturned like a character from a Dr Seuss drawing. Michael thought that he didn’t look at all well, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer, or Crohn’s disease, or some other major illness.

  ‘Did I say I was going anyplace?’ he asked, with unexpected sharpness.

  ‘Well, no,’ Michael admitted. ‘I just assumed that since Jack is clearing your driveway, he might be doing it so that you can get your SUV out.’

  ‘Jack’s been great,’ said Bill Endersby. His smile returned and he shook his head benignly. ‘We lost our boy Bradley, but now Jack’s moved in with us and he’s like a son to us, I can tell you that. He does all the chores. My wife, Margaret, she’s like a new woman. Always singing these days, and she never sang at all after Bradley went.’

  ‘I guess you’re retired now,’ said Michael.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill Endersby. ‘You could say that.’

  ‘What did you do, before you retired?’

  Bill Endersby was silent for a while, sucking thoughtfully at his teeth as if he had a shred of meat stuck between them. Then he said, ‘I used to work for Pacific Gas and Electric. Nuclear waste disposal, that was my field.’

  ‘Oh. Sounds pretty high-tech.’

  ‘Yes, it was. Very high-tech. Very good job. But there’s a price you have to pay for everything, isn’t there?’

  Michael had no idea what he was talking about, but he nodded all the same.

  Bill Endersby checked his wristwatch, and said, ‘Shoot! Better get myself back inside. I promised Margaret I’d fix the thermostat. One minute we’re shivering like penguins and the next minute we’re sweating like pigs. Good to meet you, Greg. Keep it up, Jack. You’re doing a fine job there, son.’

  With that, he walked back up the driveway to the house and closed the front door behind him.

  ‘What did he mean by that?’ asked Michael. ‘There’s a price you have to pay for everything?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ said Jack. ‘But Bill and Margaret, they always give me the feeling that something God-awful happened in their lives which they can’t forget. I don’t like to ask what it was. I don’t think it was just their Bradley dying.’

  He paused, looking toward the house, and then he said, ‘Come to that, they have pictures of Bradley all over, but they never specifically say that he died, or even that he passed away. They never use those actual words. They only say that he went, or that they lost him, and I guess that could equally mean that all he did was up and walk out on them.’

  He started chipping at the ice again, but then Michael said, ‘I think we need to find out what’s going on here, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. How do we do that? Supposing there’s nothing going on and it’s just us having the heebie-jeebies? Like I said, supposing they’re all just too flush-centered, and that’s what makes you and me think that they’re freaks?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Jack,’ said Michael, and then he told him about all the people he had seen standing in the street outside Isobel’s house.

  Jack listened with a serious expression on his face. After Michael had described how he had run out into the street to find that there was nobody there, he said, ‘They didn’t leave no tracks behind them? A hundred people or more, and they didn’t leave a single footprint?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Michael told him. ‘You may not believe me, but I saw them with my own eyes, and I swear to you that they were really there.’

  Jack had a long think about that, and then he propped his shovel against the side of Bill Endersby’s SUV and said, ‘Come with me.’

  He walked up to the side of the house, where there was a yellow-painted gate. He reached over the top of it and slid back a bolt. He beckoned Michael to follow him through to the back yard.

  ‘What do you see here?’ he said.

  Michael looked around. Immediately behind the house there was a patio with a low brick wall around it and a brick barbecue in one corner. From the patio, three steps led up to a snow-blanketed area which was obviously grassed in the summer. At the very end of this area stood a birdhouse on a pole, with a net bag hanging from it, filled with nuts.

  ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’ asked Michael.

  ‘You see that bag of nuts, on the birdhouse?’

  ‘Yes. What of it?’

  ‘That’s fresh, that bag of nuts, isn’t it? Like it’s only just been hung up there?’

  ‘OK. And …?’

  ‘Margaret put those up there, first thing today.’

  ‘Right. But I still don’t see what you’re …’

  He suddenly stopped, in mid-sentence. The snow-covered area that led to the birdhouse was completely smooth, with not a single footprint on it.

  ‘I was looking out the kitchen window this morning when I was drinking my coffee and I saw the fresh bag of nuts hanging up there but the fact that Margaret hadn’t left any footprints didn’t hit me till you told me all about those people standing outside of your house. How did she hang those nuts up there without leaving any footprints? Don’t tell me she flew.’

  The two of them looked at each other, equally lost for an answer.

  ‘I think you’re right, man,’ said Jack. ‘There is something weird going down here, and it’s not because everybody’s too flush-centered. Trouble is, how do we find out what it is? I don’t think anyb
ody’s going to tell us if we ask them right out, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could try asking Doctor Connor.’

  ‘And you really think she’s going to tell you?’

  ‘She might.’

  ‘On the other hand she might not. Supposing everybody in Trinity has some really rare disease and they’re being kept here so that they don’t spread it?’

  ‘Well, you could be right. But that doesn’t explain how they can walk around in the snow without leaving footprints, does it? Even people with Ebola leave footprints.’

  ‘Maybe it’s us,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe we’re hallucinating. Maybe we’re still in a coma after our accidents and this is some kind of drug-induced dream.’

  ‘Two people can’t have the same dream.’

  ‘Then maybe one of us isn’t real. Maybe one of us is dreaming about the other one. The question is, which one of us is real and which one of us is imaginary? I sure feel real.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Michael, leaning back against the wall. ‘None of this makes any goddamned sense at all.’

  Just then, the kitchen door opened and Bill Endersby appeared.

  ‘Jack?’ he called out. ‘What are you doing back here? Did you finish clearing the driveway yet?’

  ‘It’s freaking cold out here, Bill. I was taking a break.’

  ‘If you’re cold, the best thing you can do is get on with your shoveling! That’ll warm you up!’

  He went back inside and slammed the kitchen door. Jack gave him the finger.

  ‘I thought you said they treated you like their own son,’ said Michael.

  ‘They do. And if he ran away, that’s probably why. No – I’m not being fair. They’re very good to me. I guess you could say that Bill is a little old-fashioned, that’s all. But Margaret’s always fussing over me and baking me cookies and stuff.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain how she can walk on snow without leaving tracks.’

  They walked back to the front of the house.

  ‘What are you planning on doing?’ Jack asked him. ‘Are you going to ask your doctor straight out, or what?’