The Uninvited

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  She flushed the toilet and washed her hands. The tiny bathroom was spotless. A clean towel hung on a rack on the back of the door. Had he done this? Was he married? Was he gay?

  She reentered the kitchen, without the plunger.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Now I’d like to know what the hell you’re doing here!”

  He was sitting at a little table by the window. In the light his hair appeared amber; his eyes looked amber, too, as she got closer. He was slim, all right. Not the breaking-down-the-door type at all. He sported a bit of fluff on his chin that didn’t look as if it would ever get a diploma as a full-fledged beard. He was older than her but not by much, she guessed. He didn’t look angry anymore, just clinically perturbed.

  “Jackson Page,” he said, “but I go by Jay. Not that you asked. But a name gives us something to work with.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. She had buttoned up her shirt in the bathroom. No need to inflame the locals. She noticed a kettle on the stove, a teapot waiting on the counter. The kitchen, like the bathroom, was Spartan, but in apple-pie order.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m Mimi. Nice to meet you, Jay. And now that we’ve got the intros out of the way, do you live here?” He shook his head. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Because this is private property.”

  Jay pushed himself back from the table and stretched out his legs. He was wearing white jeans and an olive drab tee. And the memory stick around his neck. She didn’t think the average redneck carried a memory stick, but she didn’t know about the average psychopath. “So, you’re the one who’s been leaving the little messages?” he said.

  Now it was her turn to look perplexed.

  “Messages?”

  “The bluebird. The snake skin. The cricket. The voice.”

  Mimi backed up a step. “What?” Jay looked more or less normal-handsome, even. But he was clearly nuts. In which case, gently does it, Mimi, and stay as close to the door as you can.

  “Funny,” she said. “I was thinking about bluebirds only ten minutes ago, but the animated ones, you know? In Snow White. ”

  He didn’t speak, just stared at her, frowning, waiting. The muscles along his jawbone twitched.

  “Well, my bluebird was not animated,” he said. “It was dead. It was lying right here on the table.”

  She stared at the table, at his hands resting there, making a nest for an invisible dead bird. His hands were long and slender but strong looking. He wore a yellow bangle around a slim but muscled wrist. Stay on task, she told herself.

  “Could it have gotten in somehow-the bluebird, I mean-and then tried to escape through the window?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “Well, I just did. Except it was only a guess.”

  “And the snake skin?”

  Mimi rolled her eyes. “Listen, the only snakeskin I’ve ever seen was on a really nice pair of boots at Bloomingdale’s.”

  His frown lessened. Or at least his forehead uncreased a little.

  “I couldn’t afford the boots. And seriously, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “This snake skin was curled on the pillow on my bed,” he said.

  “Eeuw! But I thought you said you didn’t live here.”

  “I don’t. I crash sometimes. I have a mattress in case I end up working late.”

  “‘Working late’?”

  “We were talking about the snake skin,” he said.

  “Right.” Mimi shuddered. “That is gross!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Her arms were still crossed, and she hugged herself a little tighter at the thought of what he was saying. Then the kettle whistled and he got up to attend to it.

  She backed out of his way, but from the way his head was hanging, she didn’t think he was much of a threat anymore. Kind of sweet, really.

  “So, Jay,” she said, her voice upbeat, “what is it you do here? Which is not the same as what are you doing here-a question you still haven’t answered.”

  He grinned a little. He was still clearly pissed, but just maybe she could win him over. She had a habit of shooting first and asking later, but she did not want this to get messy.

  “You want some tea?” he asked, good manners winning out over smoldering resentment.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Tea would be good.”

  “There’s no milk,” he said.

  “And no lemon, I guess.”

  He shook his head. “No fridge.” Then, with the tea steeping in a Brown Betty teapot, he resumed his seat at the little table. She pulled out the chair across from him. It was a bright yellow chair that might have seemed cheery under different circumstances.

  “I’m still waiting,” she said.

  But he stirred his tea and wouldn’t look at her.

  “Listen,” she said, “whatever’s been happening here, it wasn’t me. I left New York yesterday and crossed the Peace Bridge at around two this afternoon, entering Canada for the first time in my life.”

  He looked at her candidly.

  “And I hate snakes,” she said. “Except in expensive boots.”

  He smiled. What a treat! Maybe she’d keep him around-as a maid. Then the smile wilted. He sighed and lowered his head. He knitted his fingers together.

  Shit, she thought. He’s going to say grace.

  But he was just sad. Sad and drained.

  “This stuff has really gotten to you, huh?”

  He looked up at her and nodded. “You could say that. Somebody obviously doesn’t love me being here.”

  It was the perfect segue. But some instinct made Mimi hold her fire. She knew she’d have to burst this guy’s bubble sooner or later, but she was intrigued. And she wasn’t stupid, either. If somebody didn’t want Jay here, was that somebody going to take kindly to her?

  “It’s not what you’d call an all-out terror campaign,” she said. “I mean you haven’t found any dolls that look like you with pins stuck in them or pentagrams written in blood on the door, right?”

  He chuckled. But then he looked hard at her, and his shiny brown-gold eyes glowed so strongly she had to look away. That wasn’t something she did very often.

  He poured their tea at the counter. “In a way, it’s worse,” he said, handing her a mug. “Come on.”

  He led her from the kitchen into a front room that was empty except for a vacuum cleaner standing guard in one corner and a beanbag chair by the east-side window with a few books and magazines strewn around it. Through a door she saw a mattress on a bare floor in the only other room. The bed was covered with a bright blue comforter.

  There was a stairway with light cascading down it like a warm yellow carpet. She followed him up to the second level, and this was another story altogether. She had heard about this from her father, but he had been vague about the details, either because he’d forgotten or preferred to keep it a surprise. And what a surprise!

  There had been interior walls up here, a bedroom or two, but they were gone now. The space was wide open-a loft-with posts and beams to take the weight of the missing walls. The room was naturally lit by a gable window in the front and one in the back. There was also a window at the east end and two smaller windows to either side of the chimney stack on the west wall. The floor was stained with colorful spots and dribbles, courtesy of her father. A large carpet of industrial gray twill covered most of the central space, and on the carpet sat a couple of Ikea-type trestle tables, upon one of which sat an impressive Mac connected by all sorts of cables and adapters and who knows what to a couple of synthesizers and an array of black boxes stacked in a rack behind what she guessed had to be some kind of mixing board. There was a ratty-looking Yamaha keyboard and several other electronic thingies strewn on the floor, their little LED lights glowing in readiness. Guitars were arrayed on stands around Action Central. So was what she thought must be an electronic drum kit. There were mikes on stands, speakers and headphones, and a music stand and…
>
  “Shit!” she said. “It’s a recording studio.”

  He laughed. “Well, sort of,” he said modestly. Then once again his face fell and he looked sad, defeated. She carefully put down her mug of tea on the floor by the stairs.

  “I have bad luck with liquids and computers,” she said. “I fried my laptop with a double latte.”

  “Bummer,” he said. But his mind was elsewhere. “I want you to hear something.”

  He cleared a space on the desk and put down his own teacup. Then he booted up the Mac. He sat, put on a pair of headphones, and started moving things around on the screen with a mouse, so quickly and expertly that she didn’t have time to catch what he was doing. When he stopped, the screen was filled with blocks of color like a Mondrian painting on a gray background. He vacated his seat and the headphones.

  She sat and he placed the headphones on her and tightened them for her. And when she nodded that she was comfortable, he punched the space bar.

  Simple was written in the title band at the top of the screen. There were instrument names written in a list down the left-hand side of the screen. It was some kind of musical composition. Yes. There was a goofy-sounding riff played, she guessed, on the Yamaha. Her mother had bought her a similar keyboard when she was a kid, before her musical talents had been tested and found to be nonexistent. But the goofy theme soon was undermined by a deep and resonant sound and a wind song that seemed to blow the melody out of the water, replacing it with a harmonically complex tune that she realized was a variation of the rinky-dink Yamaha melody. Meanwhile, a rhythm was beginning to pulse under the rich tapestry of sound, picking up momentum. She nodded in time with it, smiling.

  “Can you hear it?” he asked.

  She went to take off the headphones, but he stayed her hand. He wanted her to keep listening. “Hear what?” she said, too loud, because of the music pounding in her ears. The question was ridiculous.

  “Listen closely,” he shouted.

  She concentrated but felt a little exasperated. This was nuts! And then suddenly she heard something unexpected. Unexpected because it was random-out of sync to the orchestration. A chirping sound.

  She looked up at him. “The cricket?” she said. He nodded. Then he reached over her shoulder and paused the piece, and she leaned back in the chair and pulled off the headphones. She looked at him. “You didn’t put it there?” He shook his head. “And you can’t get rid of it?”

  He shrugged. “I can. I mean it’s on its own track. But it took me awhile to figure it out.”

  Mimi looked at the screen, at the charts and graphs there that indicated the paused music. There were tracks arrayed down the screen; each instrumental voice had its own. And sure enough, there was a track labeled “cricket.” She pointed at it.

  “Yeah, well, when I figured it out, I labeled it,” he said. “I mean, at first I thought it must have just gotten in the house and I’d picked up the sound of it. You see there’s an acoustic guitar track that isn’t recorded direct.”

  “Eng?lish, please.”

  “Sorry. I had to mike the guitar, and if there had been any ambient sound in the room, the mike would have picked it up. But when I listened to that track, it was fine. No cricket.”

  “And the other tracks?”

  “Direct.”

  “And, like, there couldn’t be a cricket actually in the computer… No. I guess that would be your classic really stupid question.”

  “So?”

  Mimi wasn’t sure if she got it, but when she looked into Jay’s face, she could see that he wanted her to try.

  She twirled around slowly in the chair and stared out the eastern window. A rough meadow rose to a low hill. Was this the tulloch that Marc had told her about? A hundred yards beyond it, there was an impenetrable wall of conifer green, as if that was the end of the magic vale and the beginning of the proverbial deep, dark forest. The one your father took you out to get lost in if you didn’t remember to bring your bread crumbs.

  “You’re saying someone sat here and actually recorded that sound onto your piece-into it?”

  “Yes,” said Jay.

  “Weird,” said Mimi.

  “And now listen to this,” he said.

  “Now wait, enough already. We have to talk.”

  “Just one more thing,” he said.

  “Seriously, Jay-”

  “Please,” he said, interrupting her. “I haven’t told anyone about this shit, and it’s been driving me crazy.”

  She could see that. Okay. With one last glare, she put the headphones back on while he zipped around with the mouse, moving ahead in the score. Then he pushed the space bar again. The music had progressed into a driving rhythm with a wailing guitar over the top, and if it was Jay playing, he was pretty good. But she knew now that compliments were not what he was after. So she sank down below the sound, and this time there were no crickets. But there was something odd. Something that she didn’t think was supposed to be there. She scanned the instrument tracks. No. Not listed.

  Someone was breathing. Breathing hard. But not in the sexual sense-it didn’t sound like that. It just sounded like someone breathing to be heard.

  She took off the headphones and rolled her chair away from the table. She got up, wanting to be as far away from the computer and that breathing as she could get. “Okay, that is fucking weird,” she said.

  Jay nodded, his face grave, but softened by what she guessed must be gratitude.

  “Let me get this straight. You’ve changed the locks?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He had taken the seat and was putting the computer to sleep.

  “So this weirdo guy-does he come in through the window?”

  “Who says it’s a guy?”

  “It’s a guy,” she said. “Trust me.”

  Jay threw up his hands. “Okay, whatever, Sherlock.” She walked over to the gable window and felt around the frame. Painted shut. No sign of being opened in years.

  “I already checked,” said Jay. “They’re all like that, except for the one on the eastern wall. I had opened it to air the place out.”

  “Ah!” said Mimi, turning and resting her butt against the sill. “In New York we have second-story men. Ever heard of those?”

  Jay nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I was kind of slow on the uptake. Then I remembered the ladder.”

  “A ladder? How convenient is that?”

  He snorted. “It’s an old rickety, handmade thing. I found it out in the meadow. I think it was used for picking apples. I used it myself to fix some broken glass. Then I stowed it in the rafters in the shed. When I went to look at it again, the feet were muddy. I hadn’t put it back that way.”

  Mimi nodded and looked around. “No muddy-footed ladder for our Jackson,” she said. “You’re a pretty anal guy, right?”

  “If you want to call it that.” Jay stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “All I mean is it’s so tidy, ” she said. “That isn’t exactly common among twenty-year-olds.”

  “Twenty-two,” he said. “Twenty-three in September.”

  “Ah, well. There you go.”

  “People use the term anal as if it’s some kind of disease,” he said. “You know what it means to me? It means getting organized. Staying on track. Getting things done.”

  “But you’re an artist,” she said. “What about creative chaos and all that?”

  “Art is the opposite of chaos,” he said. Then he smiled. “And thanks for the compliment. If it was one.”

  “It was,” said Mimi. “The music is dead cool. And hey, sorry about ribbing you. You’ve got like sixty million dollars’ worth of electronics here, so dust and crud are probably not a good thing. Let alone heavy breathing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You smashed the ladder to little bits with an ax and nailed all the windows shut and that was that, right?”

  He shook his head. “No. But I did chain the ladder to the r
afters and locked it with my titanium bike lock.”

  “Ha!”

  “What?”

  “Those things are so easy to break,” said Mimi. “You just spray the thing with starter fluid- psssssssst! — pop it with a hammer andpoof! — titanium dust.”

  “More wisdom from the city.”

  “Hey, I lost three bikes before a cop finally set me straight.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Jay, “nobody’s touched the ladder since.” He leaned against a post. “And still this he or she or it manages to get in, access my computer, and leave behind some heavy breathing.”

  “Fairies?”

  But Jay wasn’t listening. “There has to be a way in that I haven’t discovered,” he said.

  Mimi smacked her palm to her forehead.

  “What?”

  She took his hand. “Come on.” She led him downstairs and into the bedroom.

  Mimi got to her knees and started feeling the floor with her hands, fingers splayed. It was parquet, a pattern of squares of different-colored wood.

  “Did you lose a contact?” he asked.

  “Uh-uh,” she said. She ran the edge of her thumb along an almost imperceptible groove. “Move your mattress.”

  “What?”

  “Really. Just do it!”

  He lifted the foam mattress and pushed it vertically against the wall. By then she’d found what she was looking for, a loose square of wood, which she lifted to reveal a circle of brass, laying flat on the underflooring. She lifted the ring and then pulled harder. A trapdoor opened.

  “Voila!”

  “Holy shit!”

  “No,” said Mimi. “A hidey-hole. Kind of a nineteenth-century panic room.”

  He joined her and lifted the door completely open. It was heavy. Chains held it from folding all the way back. They peered down into a space about five feet deep, a tiny earthen room.

  “I’ve been using this house for years,” said Jay, “and I had no idea that was here.”

  “There’s a tunnel to the outside,” said Mimi. She was glowing with the sweat of lifting the heavy door.

  “How did you know about it?” he asked.

  She looked up at him, pushed a wing of hair back from her eyes.