He saw no one in the kitchen. Grasping the handgun in both fists like a trained policeman would, he stepped around the stove. Nothing crouching there. In the bathroom, nothing. He used the pistol’s barrel to thrust the shower curtain aside, tearing it a little more as he did so.
Just his own shadow on the mildewed tiles.
It had escaped, and now Ned knew that locked doors could not keep the being—or beings—out. Yes, they had to be made of something less, or more, than flesh. They might be able to step out of their dimension at any point they chose. So how could he defend himself from them? How could he ever have peace, now that they had decided to haunt him?
He paced the house. Looked in every room, again and again. He made coffee, and as he paced with the gun in one hand and a mug in the other, he took note of the cracks in the plaster of the kitchen ceiling. Had he simply neglected to notice, or were they more pronounced than they ever had been? He didn’t remember them ever being so extensive before...
Could the alien—the aliens—have something to do with this? Were they lurking even now in the attic above him? For months now he had heard stirrings up there, creaking boards, faint scampering he had taken to be squirrels that had gotten into the eaves, storing nuts or whatnot for the winter. The beings’ weight up there where no one ever ventured might have stressed the plaster of the ceiling...
Maybe they even did these things on purpose. That might well explain the extent of the seeming decay around him, now that he knew they could venture right into his house with him. Might they have done something to his kitchen faucet to make its flow a trickle? Might they have tampered with his car’s starter one night?
Why would they do that, the bastards? He set down his mug, glared again at the cracked ceiling. Why? The power to cross dimensions, and just so they could act as poltergeists, as gremlins, wreaking petty havoc? Why?
Ned smiled bitterly, narrowed his eyes, contemplating possible motivations. It might be an experiment. Perhaps they had made him a lab rat in his own home, to be probed and taunted, his agitation observed. Maybe they wanted to test the reaction humans might have to their kind.
But no, they were too mischievous for that. Ned considered the possibility that it might in fact be children, or at least the alien equivalent of teenage delinquents, skipping into the human realm to tease him, have some wanton fun.
But the fun seemed too wanton, even for cruel children. Ned considered something else, remembering the many stories of abductions by these entities, the way they bound and probed, practically tortured their helpless victims.
Perhaps it was as simple as their being a race of sado-masochists. Maybe it excited them to make their victims helpless, and afraid, in the way that a rapist feels empowered, or a bondage freak when he ties up and dominates another, or a stronger prison inmate when he sodomizes a weaker. In the prison of existence, maybe that was the relationship humans fulfilled for these other, supposedly superior beings. They were warped, and mean-spirited, and needed to feel empowered, and even when they were not literally capturing their prey they still took delight in playing games with them, making them afraid, terrified...
But Ned’s anger was fast beginning to drown out his fear. They were taunting the wrong man. They would find that this prisoner had a shiv hidden in his palm.
“Come on,” he whispered to the cracked ceiling, as if they might hear him through the cracks, have their huge black eyes pressed to them. “Come on,” he taunted them back.
* * *
Ned lay on the living room floor, belly down, ear flat to the dusty boards. Did he hear a faint movement down there? Maybe the beings hadn’t removed or killed the elderly couple after all. At last, he got up and called their number on the phone. The old woman answered, and he hung up. It probably was her voice, but not necessarily.
Could they take on human guise? He had considered that. If so, how many of the people he had known in his life might be one of them? Or if they could not literally become human, might they at least enter into humans somehow, to possess them, control them like a skeleton hand inside a clown puppet?
He had even wondered if they might be what remained of humans...dead humans. Might that being in the workshop actually have been his grandfather? All that was left of his grandfather, his soul, visiting from whatever plane the soul really did depart to? No...he doubted that. It would not explain the stories of abductions, experiments, the ships that delivered them here from whatever world or plane they dwelt on. But Ned did believe that the being or beings he had seen might very well explain the stories of visitations by angels over the centuries. Luminous entities, otherworldly, ethereal.
And from his own experiences, he believed that they might just as easily account for stories of demons, as well.
“Come to the zoo,” he muttered, making a fresh pot of coffee, glancing up at the ceiling. He drank no beer at all now, just lots of coffee, coffee to keep him alert. He wasn’t getting much sleep, mostly just naps in his chair while it was light out. “Is that it? Come see us in the zoo? Stare at us? Laugh at us in our cages?”
After he had stirred in his sugar and milk he stood in the center of the room, head tilted up. “You think we’re funny? You think I’m funny, is that it?”
A tiny creak of sound answered him. And he saw one of the spider-webbed cracks in the ceiling widen, ever so slightly. He heard the sifting fall of plaster dust. Both sight and sound were so subtle, it was like watching the minute hand of a clock move. But the minute hands of clocks did indeed move, and cracks in plaster widened, and he had seen it happen.
Without another word, Ned set down his mug, picked up the .357 from the counter and went out into his back hall, started up the stairway to the attic. His jaw jutted from the clenching of his teeth, the tightness of his smile.
It was late afternoon, gilded sunlight lying in elongated patches across the dirty attic floorboards. Thank God evening hadn’t yet fallen. He needed a new flashlight. If it had been evening, he wouldn’t even be up here. Maybe he’d make them sorry they hadn’t kept quiet until the sun went down.
An object momentarily distracted him. On a ratty old arm chair rested a sheet of cardboard, and on that was all that remained of a wreath his aunt had given him and his wife on their first anniversary. Some kind of dried arrangement. Now all that was left of it were bits and pieces, not even describing a circle. Bugs, maybe, or the sun blazing on it through unshaded windows. Or perhaps, bored and mischievous, his house-guests had sat up here plucking at it. Brenda had left behind a lot of forgotten things in boxes up here, and the idea of those creatures poking through them only exasperated his mounting fury...
He moved toward a half-closed door that marked the place where the roof narrowed. The room beyond had sharply slanted walls, and just one window at its end, looking out on the driveway. It would be dark in there. The chimney came skewering through that space, and there were stacks of boards and boxes to hunker behind. It was the perfect place in which to hide.
With his toe, Ned pushed the door open all the way.
But they weren’t even hiding. Had they become so bold that they now dared to stand and confront him? Were they no longer afraid to be seen? No longer afraid of him?
Their brazenness caught him off guard. Some of his fury was washed back by an icy wave of fear.
There were two of them standing side by side at the end of the hall-like space, framed in the window, silhouetted in a way that lessened their phosphorescent quality, made them appear more corporeal. They were indistinguishable from one another, identical.
Tall, bony as prisoners of war. Dead prisoners of war. So unnaturally, uncannily elongated, as if they were distorted in carnival mirrors. Yet there was something vaguely feminine in their form; maybe a slight flare in the hips, the adolescent suggestion of breasts.
Silhouetted as they were, it was difficult to make out their great insect-like eyes. Mantis eyes. But somehow, seeing the eyes in suggestion made them more eerie to him than if they had
been clearly lit.
“What do you want with me?” Ned hissed at them. He was sorry he spoke. He meant his voice to sound demanding. Instead, he heard its tremor. But he couldn’t help but blurt, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
And with that, he lifted his arm to point the .357.
They moved faster than humans should, with bird-quick jerking swiftness. First one and then the other of the identical beings whirled and dropped out the window, which Ned hadn’t noticed was open before. Like jumping spiders, they were so fast. Gone, before he could level the red front sight on them.
Ned surged forward down the murky hall, came to the open window. Directly below the window was the slanting, half-collapsed garage roof.
He saw no prints in the deep snow of the roof, as he should. Maybe they hadn’t actually jumped onto it, but scrabbled down the side of the house and leapt to the ground itself. It didn’t matter...Ned caught a glimpse of one of them as it ducked inside the cave of the garage. He was sure the both of them now huddled in its furthest shadows, like vampires waiting for night to fall.
“You just stay there,” he whispered. “You just make yourself right at home.”
* * *
There wasn’t much more that Ned could do that evening, but he got up early the next morning as if to go to work. Nonchalantly, he ignored the garage as he walked past it and got in his car.
In town, he bought two lengths of strong nylon cord.
In the parking lot of the store he examined his car, figuring out how he might attach one end of the linked cords. He had no trailer hitch. The frame beneath, somewhere? It was easiest, he decided, to open both rear windows and pass one end of the cord right through the back, in one side and out the other. Satisfied with at least this end of the problem, he drove home to confront the second half of the equation. As he steered the car, his heart raced like a rat in a wheel, as if its mad workings were what powered the vehicle as it sped back to his haunted house.
He backed the car into the driveway, got out, and began to uncoil his rope, sheltered on the far side of the car so his actions couldn’t yet be seen. But he couldn’t help throwing a smile at the dark maw of the garage. Did the vampires slumber, or were they watching avidly with their lidless eyes?
He fastened one end of the joined cords through the back of his car, as he had planned. “You should have messed with the car again,” he muttered. “You should have done something else to it, huh?”
From under his coat he withdrew the Magnum. Then, taking his rope with him like a spelunker venturing into a labyrinth deep in the earth, Ned crouched down and gingerly entered the garage.
Since last evening he had tried to remember what kind of supports the cross beams had, what might be holding up this end of the roof...if it were even something a car might dislodge. The answer was better than he had hoped. It filled him both with gratitude, and horror that he had dared to enter this potential rat trap.
All that really continued to support the roof on the right was a gallows-like structure, a frail little brace of wood. All he had to do was fasten the cord to the lower part of that brace, yank it away, and the top portion would surely give way. The roof must be precarious even now.
But were they in here, to be trapped?
The gallows brace was half-way into the garage. Keeping his eyes on the shadows at the back of the cave, he straightened up as best he could and began tying the cord around the forty-five degree support arm. In order to do this, he had to reluctantly tuck the pistol in his waistband. His breathing grew rapid, and his breath became an obscuring ectoplasm before his eyes. Suddenly very frightened not to be able to see into the back of the garage, he held his breath while he finished tying off the cord. He knotted it again and again, so that the car’s pull would not simply unravel it.
At last he finished, and squatted back down so he could retreat. He thought he really should venture in just a little deeper, to verify that they were indeed back there before he fully toppled the structure. But no...that was what they wanted. This was their den, now. They were there; he knew it.
As he turned to go back, he saw one of the aliens’ faces peering out at him from the garage’s rubble, not two feet from his face. Huge black eyes, compressed slash of a mouth, a blank face with no soul behind it to give it life.
He cried out, wrenched free his handgun and continued the motion by smashing it like a hammer across that staring visage in a vicious backhand blow.
Glass shattered, and he felt his flesh tear in several places. The gun dropped from his hand and fell through the old leaning window pane he had just struck.
He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest. Just a reflection. But it couldn’t have been his...he hadn’t mistaken what he’d seen. It had to have been one of the aliens, lurking behind him, peering over his shoulder.
He twisted sharply around. Neither of them was there. But he knew they were close at hand. Without waiting for them to pour in upon him, he left the gun behind and scurried out of the garage into the glaring safety of outside air.
Still gripping his gushing hand, Ned slipped into his car. Started it. Yes, they should have screwed with this starter too, shouldn’t they?
Ned clamped his fists on the wheel and stamped his foot on the gas pedal. His car lurched forward...began to race up the slope of the driveway, spitting a fusillade of pebbles behind it...
And then it was brought up short with a jolt, as if it had struck a phone pole. Ned hadn’t fastened his seat belt, and nearly pitched into the windshield.
Behind him came the delayed second half of the crash he had heard inside his house that night.
“Yes!” Ned exclaimed, savoring the monstrous shriek of tormented wood. It might have been the banshee wail of his grandfather’s ghost, anguished at seeing his grandson level the remnants of the structure.
Did he actually hear some unearthly shrieking mixed in with the falling-tree sound of the crash?
Gripping his slashed hand once more, Ned stepped out of the car to take in the results. He saw that the nylon cord had snapped, but only after its work had been done.
The roof was not totally flat. There had been an old washer and stove in there, other items and piles of debris to prevent the roof from uniform flatness, but it was flat enough to have crushed anything remotely human inside it. Ned would have worried about a stray cat being caught in that avalanche.
The back wall alone was standing, though leaning and with boards torn free. Through a gaping section, Ned could see the neighbors who had left that basket of weeds on his porch as a gift, peeking through to see what the noise had been. Two pairs of glittering, stealthy eyes. If he had still had his gun in his hand, Ned would have fired through the boards at those eyes. In fact, he reached to his waistband before he remembered he had lost the Magnum in the cave-in.
“Go away!” he shouted at the two of them instead. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”
* * *
For the next few nights, he didn’t see the aliens again.
But one night, when he stood at the toilet, his mind filled with the golden haze of beer, his peripheral vision picked up a dim glow reflected in the mirror over the sink.
He jerked back so abruptly that he spattered the floor, backed out of the bathroom and clawed at the light switch on the wall outside the door.
The overhead light came on. He stole back into the room, stole up to the sink, steeled himself for a dead-on look in the mirror.
Just his reflection. But he regarded it with a frown. He had lost weight, his cheeks bony, his thin lips a tight line. His eyes glared from dark hollows. He was tall and slender to begin with, and now looked all the more cadaverous.
He had been sleeping in his bed again. Drinking again. He had let his guard down...
Could they have returned? Could one of them, at least, have survived? And invaded him in a place where it couldn’t be evicted?
He backed out of the bathroom a second time, not lowering his gaze from h
is own gaze.
That was what they thought, that they couldn’t be evicted...
He would watch for them. He would check, every day.
He still had the guns hidden throughout his house. He must not let his guard down again. He must remain vigilant.
He had killed two of them. He would kill each one that came for him. He would shoot them. Each and every one...until, besieged, he either shot them all or was overrun, trying.
And if he saw in the mirror what he had seen reflected in that old window in the garage...if it came to that...then he would shoot himself, as well.
And so he watched. And he waited.
T-SHIRTS OF THE DAMNED
“T-Shirt Babylon, purveyors of the extremely unpleasant...can I help you?” Hays said when he answered the phone. He came up with a new motto every day, much to his own amusement. Yesterday it had been, “T-Shirt Babylon, where the T stands for torture.” Not one of his best ones, but the phone had rung before he had a wittier one prepared.
It was his fiance, Dawn. She wanted to know how late he’d be staying at the shop; his parents were coming to dinner tonight to celebrate their engagement, and he was already forty-five minutes later than he’d said he’d be.
Hays stalked his office with the phone tucked under his jaw, its extra-long cord trailing. He always paced while on the phone, which was a lot, while Dawn handled more of the actual production details. Not that she chose the subject matter of the T-shirts...oh no, that was the most fun to be had, and this was his company. T-Shirt Babylon and Dicky Hays were one and the same thing.
“I’m still waiting for that pinhead LeClair to call me, babe. He said he’d call at four. He better not have forgotten me...that human slime.”
Again Dawn warned Hays of what another dealer had told them about LeClair...that he would buy a fairly small number of shirts, then tell Hays he hadn’t sold them all yet rather than ordering more, when in reality he had had his people copy Hays’ shirts and was selling his own bootleg versions instead.
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