Room by room. Every window got a vibration alarm. Anybody who tried to enter from the outside would get hit with enough decibels to drive them deaf in less than two minutes. Every window got a security dowel and sliding aluminum lock latch. Every window got metal screws across the top of the frame, every three inches, so there was no possibility of lifting the pane out unless you removed them from the inside.
New front door and garage deadbolts and knobs installed.
The sliding glass door got quadruple-redundant lock systems. Side gate got a lock you couldn’t drill through unless you owned a diamond tip.
Rear fencing was fortified with three upward-extending feet of chicken wire. He’d bought the cheap kind because it cut his finger when he was trying to make a decision on which roll to buy. He’d almost asked the clerk if they had razor-wire, but decided that was beyond the pale. Plus, that would give Claire a sense of how he felt, which was how she shouldn’t feel. This was his problem.
He ripped up his little warning note. The rear window it had been protecting was now a barely-openable sheet of glass rigged up to wail like a banshee if a fluttering leaf accidentally brushed its surface. He felt better about that.
Roger noticed that it would be easy to escape from his backyard to a side alley through one of the neighbor’s unfenced yards. That was unacceptable. There should be no easy point of access.
Where’s Abe Pearson and his amazing fence-building skills when you need him?
But Abe Pearson was a goodie-two-shoes—hell, a dentist. Roger thought himself from scrappier stock. He went old school, constructing a four-foot-high bramble patch outside that stretch of his fencing, stacking cut blackberry stalks and thorny rose branches until his arms were covered in tiny seeping cuts.
If I bleed, they bleed.
CLAIRE WAS STILL SPOOKED. He could hear it in her voice. It was easy to talk her into staying another night at her parents’ house.
“How’s it going there?”
“Good. Good. I think we’ll be all set for you guys to come back tomorrow.”
“You want me to call at Julie’s bedtime tonight?”
“Hell yes. I miss you guys. It’s too quiet here. I’m used to having some music playing through the TV . . . ”
“Yeah. Thank you for taking care of this.”
“Of course.”
“And you’re taking care of you too, right? Getting some sleep?”
“Definitely. I mean, not a lot. It still feels kind of weird here. It’s going to take some time.”
“But you’re okay?”
He looked around at the chaos of the dining room, the unaddressed paperwork, his arms smeared with clotted droplets of blood and metal shavings.
“Yeah. Of course. I’m good. I’ve got this.”
“Okay. Love you, babe.”
“Love you too.”
By seven that night he had their exact same model of television installed in the living room, and a slightly newer laptop running in the office. High On Fire was blasting from the TV speakers in the living room; Roger found the sound a comforting replacement for his own frantic breathing and constant room-to-room footfalls, even though at one point the vocals reminded him of something he was trying to forget from the night before—that growling—and he had to turn down the volume.
On the way back from his second outing of high-speed shopping and credit card limit testing, he noticed, for the first time ever, that there were little signs mounted on the lamp posts around his block.
“Protected by Neighborhood Watch.”
Some job they’d done.
He decided it was time to reinvigorate the watch and rouse it from the fucking coma which had allowed his house—and their neighborhood—to be infiltrated. They needed to know that they had failed, and they needed to start keeping an eye out for the next invasion. Roger wolfed a batch of microwave chicken tikka masala and tried to calm down his all-day coffee binge with some beer. Then he opened up a new document on the laptop.
Dear Neighbors,
I regret to inform you that our house at 1450 SE Lily Court suffered a break-in yesterday evening, somewhere between 4:30pm and 9:00pm. Several pieces of jewelry and electronics were stolen. Our family is unharmed, so we’re very thankful for that blessing. However, we’re now feeling much less safe in a neighborhood that we’ve loved for a long time, and we certainly wouldn’t wish for you to feel the same. In the event that these burglars have decided to target this neighborhood, I recommend you take a look at the security of your household. And I know it’s considered rude for this area, but it might be wise to start leaving exterior lights on through the evening.
Also, as this occurrence managed to slip right under the nose of our normally vigilant neighborhood watch, perhaps we should step up our game and really keep an eye out for anything strange (whether that’s unfamiliar vehicles on our block or questionable, lingering pedestrians, or even solicitors who ask too many questions about the inside of your home).
Hope all is well with you, and my apologies for whatever my filing this police report might do to our property values. Ha Ha!
Best wishes,
Roger Stephenson
He printed fifty and distributed them to every mailbox—or failing that, doorstep—in a six block radius. He noticed how many houses were dark, looked uninhabited. He noticed how easy it would be to break in to almost all of them.
“There is no glass which can’t be shattered, no lock which can’t be broken.
No life which can’t be taken.”
Jesus. What was wrong with that guy?
He contemplated filing a complaint about Officer Hayhurst, but knew “He Made Me Generally Uneasy” wasn’t something they’d put Internal Affairs on right away.
He saw no one else on the streets. But on the way home there was a rustling in the bushes in front of him and suddenly a tiny black rabbit shot out and darted across the street, finding cover behind an above-ground garden hutch.
Roger didn’t actually leap into the air, but inside it felt as if he had.
The incident made him notice two things. The first was that he was scared in a way he couldn’t spend too much time thinking about. The second was that his instinct, immediately, had been to kill that rabbit.
MOUNTING THE SECURITY CAMERA was the last step, and then he promised himself he’d call it a night.
The eaves where he wanted to tuck the camera were up much higher than his bedroom window, and night had already fallen so he had to work with a headlamp on, but he was determined. After struggling to find even footing in the wet soil below, he finally got to the top of the wobbling ladder and found a way he could shift his weight that kept at least three of the feet below firmly planted.
A huge brown mama spider hovered near a bright white cluster of eggs. Was she waiting to nurture them, or was she exhausted and hoping to eat a few babies on their birthday? He didn’t care, cancelled his normal laissez-faire policy toward spiders, and crushed the lot of them under the knuckles of his leather work glove.
He’d nearly bought the fake version of the exterior camera at the electronics store, thinking it would save an additional eighty dollar dent to their credit balance, and that the appearance of surveillance would be enough to make a burglar think twice. Then he remembered the laughter which had come from his backyard the night before.
Someone else was treating this like a game. Someone clever enough to leave no prosecutable trail. Someone who wanted to severely agitate and confuse Roger as a bonus.
He bought the real camera. Even splurged for an upscale edition which could broadcast to both his laptop and a concealed hard drive near the device.
The mounting went easy, aside from Roger’s exhaustion-based hand-tremors and one quest through the wet evening grass for a dropped screw. Then he drilled a slightly larger hole through the siding into the attic and ran the camera lines into the house.
He hadn’t been in the attic since they bought the place, years ago, when he’d deci
ded to save on handyman charges and box some improperly insulated electric splices by himself. He didn’t remember much from that adventure, other than wishing he’d worn a mask after stirring up all the insulation, and regretting the moment when he un-hunched just enough to drive the point of a rusty roofing nail into his back. The moment after that nail went in he pictured Oprah in his mind, yelling, “You’re all getting. . . TETANUS SHOTS!”
He wasn’t a fan of the attic, but he was ready with a headlamp and dust mask this time, so up he went. He’d have an electric eye beaming down on his backyard by midnight. Anybody made it past the brambles and the sharp elevated fencing and the drill-proof locks, they’d be right there under Big Brother’s gaze, exposed for the bullshit creepers they were.
The attic: exposed beams and insulation, trapped heat and tubing and years of suspect electrical modifications. Spiders ruled the far corners, and the old wood framing seeped sap which looked like blooms of mold or clusters of frozen blood droplets. The ceilings in the house were high and the attic was squat, which meant that Roger had to slide or crawl to get anywhere. At some point in the life of the house someone had run plywood across a couple of pathways, but not enough to get Roger over to the rear of the property so he could finish bringing in the camera wires. That meant there’d be a long section where he’d have to do a combination push-up/crawl under the rafters until he made it all the way back, his hands and feet balanced on the attic beams.
The only way out is through. Let’s get to it.
He stayed low, shaking with fatigue, and did his best to dodge splinters, nails, and plumes of lung-seeking insulation. Spider webs and long tendrils of drifting dust clung to his sweaty face. For a second he thought he saw a spider about to drop from his headlamp to his nose, and in the effort to brush it away he slammed a shoulder into the drywall beneath him.
Great! Fucking great! Yeah, honey, I got the property secured, but I also fell through the ceiling trying to wave away a spider. Hope you don’t mind the insulation in the bed. We can pretend this is the skylight you always wanted.
When he finally made his way back to the newly drilled hole and threaded in the remainder of the camera line, he found it was actually quite easy to hook up the dedicated hard drive and tap into the electric line.
He almost had the camera wired in when he heard something on the roof.
There was a slow scrape, followed by something slamming down.
Drag . . . THUMP. Drag . . . THUMP. Drag . . . THUMP.
The final thump fell on the roof above his head. Fragments of sap and insulation drifted down onto his hair. Roger froze.
He was still trying to decide between remaining entirely immobile and speed-crawling out of the attic to pursue whoever was on his property, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a man’s laughter.
What?
And then a white light was born behind his eyes and there was pressure and pain and then nothing at all.
HE WOKE IN THE dark with dusty insulation coating his mouth. The taste reminded him of when he’d helped demolish an old barn on his Grandpa Dave’s property, after he’d passed and they were prepping his property for sale. Everyone had been crying that day, but Roger was young and had barely known the old man, and was mainly excited they’d given him a sledgehammer and the right to use it. They didn’t worry about things like black mold back then. They got the job done. But in retrospect it made sense to Roger that he’d had a chest cold for about three months after they tore down that rotten old barn.
Without light to orient him, Roger spent a moment thinking he was in his bed. Only after something crawled across the back of his neck did he realize he was still in the attic.
Christ!
He slapped the back of his neck and felt an immediate, sharp jab as something crunched under his glove.
Should have brushed it off, idiot! You just slapped yourself into a nice old spider bite. Great. And my lamp’s out. I have to get back to the garage and grab a flashlight. Finish this wiring. Then I HAVE to go to bed. I’m cooked.
Roger turned around and started to crouch-crawl toward the dim, distant light coming from the attic access point in his office.
Damn. I wish this fucking thing. . .
He slapped the side of his headlamp once, then twice, and something in the jostling set the batteries straight and light came flooding out across the sea of insulation before him.
It was then that he saw the bodies.
Dozens of dead birds. Tiny, desiccated. Some with their talons turned toward the sky, others curled in on themselves. Some with eyes missing. Some with eyes dried and hollow but still shining back as the light struck them. A field of them, each a few inches apart from the other, their corpses floating on insulation, entwined in the fiberglass.
He heard a rustling sound behind him and turned his lamp to see another tiny bird struggling to lift its body and fly away with its one remaining good wing.
Roger felt the bite on the back of his neck.
Not a bite. It pecked me as I crushed it.
But how did all these birds get in? And why didn’t I see . . .
Roger almost finished the question but knew that there was no reason to be pursued here. Something wrong was happening—staring at it wouldn’t aid survival but might induce some kind of paralysis.
Wait. Wasn’t there something on the roof?
No. That’s insane. Jesus, man. Get your shit straight.
Got to clean up this die-off before it smells. I’ll look for the hole in the siding where they got in later. Then finish the camera hook-up. Claire and Julie are coming back! And I could really use another beer.
He did his best not to think again for the rest of the night, to let motion remove reflection, and so he cleaned the wound on his neck and gathered all of the corpses in the attic in a white plastic work bucket and set it out on the patio. And once he’d finally powered up the security camera and ensured it was running properly, he headed back out to the patio to grab the bucket of dead birds.
He lifted the rusty metallic lid to the fire pit in their backyard and dumped in the bodies, watching loose feathers drift down onto the pile of ash-covered dead. Then he sprayed them with an entire bottle of lighter fluid and dropped a match and tended the blaze long enough to ensure that all of the tiny hollow bones were rendered to nothing.
Once the pyre was embers, Roger turned and walked back to the office and deleted the last two hours of security footage because none of this had ever happened, and that was fine.
III.
“I KNOW, I KNOW. I miss you guys too. There’s a little more work to this than I expected. You guys camp out for one more night and then we’ll have all weekend to hang out.”
And I need a little more distance between you and the last two days, so you don’t look at Daddy and see he’s losing his mind. One more day and we’ll be alright.
In the end Claire acquiesced, though she was slow to make the call and Roger was certain she was worried about him now. But he’d promised to drive down with Mr. Grubbins and Julie’s favorite blanket to join them for dinner, so he knew if he could spruce up by then he would set Claire at ease. He’d shave the beginnings of the wolfman beard creeping up his cheeks, take a much-needed shower, and wear a nice long sleeve shirt to cover up his lacerated arms.
Things would be good.
ACCOUNTS CLOSED—NO SUSPICIOUS TRANSACTIONS identified, thank god. New accounts opened, cards issued. New checks ordered—”Have them shipped to the branch and give me a call when they show up.” Social Security Number, birthday, and mother’s maiden name provided over and over again to a variety of bored call center employees. Equifax/Transunion/Experian notified to place a permanent “Fraud Alert” on their systems to shut down attempts at identity theft. Credit monitoring account established and hard copies of all reports pulled and reviewed. Passwords changed for eighty-three goddamn internet accounts.
There was not enough coffee and music and sunshine in the world to make that mor
ning feel like anything other than some kind of modern circle in Dante’s Inferno.
“And here we see the poorest of souls, guilty of the sin of being burgled.”
“But how is this a sin? Shouldn’t it be the thieves who suffer so?”
“No, this is what is owed to these souls, who imagined a fanciful kind of safety was owed to them and chose to live in a tapestry of lies which denied the true balance of the world. These are souls who ignored the evils of our kind and by doing so allowed it to flourish.”
“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir, could you please provide your Social Security Number?”
“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir, could you please lean toward your webcam for a brief retinal scan?”
“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir, could you please write your earliest shameful memory on fine vellum and send it to me via certified mail?”
“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir . . . ”
ROGER WAS FINALLY SITTING down to what he was certain would be a long and arduous call with his insurance company when he heard a knock at the front door.
He sped to the foyer—ready to explain the meaning of his NO SOLICITING sign to those mouth-breathing CenturyLink reps for the third goddamn time—and was surprised to find a diminutive, old-timey cowboy on his stoop.
The man stood all of five-and-a-half feet, even with brown leather boots on, and was wearing a golden belt buckle so big it could have been a buffet plate. His perfectly-waxed white moustache came to a sharpened-pencil point on each side and stood in stark contrast to the deep leather wrinkles which gave his face a look of permanent concern.
The man removed his cowboy hat and held it to his chest.
“Sorry to bother you, Roger. My name’s Clem Tillson. I’m a neighbor of yours from a few blocks over on 17th. I got your little note on my doorstep this morning and I have some concerns.”
Entropy in Bloom Page 22
