The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - August 1980

by Various

  Our just-plain-insipid rating goes to a made-for-TV effort with the inspired title of The Aliens Are Coming. Since a certain movie that shall remain nameless, the word "alien" does not mean an individual from another culture, race or species. It means mean, and you can be sure that anything dubbed an alien in current masscult is going to be unpleasant physically, intellectually and morally.

  This particular lot arrives in a discshaped ship, and proceeds to try to take over Earthlings, which they accomplish by mere contact and a lot of bluish polarization.

  I don't think you need know much more about this lame effort save that the aliens are foiled, but only partially, which lays the groundwork for a whole series. Don't say I didn't warn you.

  Now for the wholesale-disaster award which of course goes to the recently-TV'd The Return of the King. At least I think it will have been recently shown when this sees print; I saw it at a fairly far up front screening, and there's always the chance that someone at ABC will have looked at it before it's broadcast.

  This Return of the King is a "sequel" to the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit which we were assaulted by some years ago on TV. In between there came the Ralph Bakshi-directed movie, The Lord of the Rings, which covered, more or less, the first book-and-a-half of the trilogy. The newest entry into confusion dismisses the first two books (and the Bakshi film) with Gandalf (in the voice of John Huston) intoning portentously that Frodo and Sam had had many brave adventures before entering Mordor, and goes on to cover (more or less) the siege of Gondor and the two hobbits' trek through Mordor.

  There were a lot of low points here; in tact, this film probably takes the cake for low points of the three. There was the minstrel of Gondor (don't ask) warbling about "Frodo of the nine fingers and the ring of doom." And that chorus of Orcs singing like the Mounties in Rose Marie, "Where there's a whip, there's a way." And the lack of elves — not an elf to be seen in this one. Well, half an elf — we meet El rond. Who says, incidentally, when asked by Frodo if he can sail from the Grey Havens with him, "There's always room for a friend."

  And the habit of Frodo and Sam, when faced by adversity, of breaking into a dreary little song which goes on about the fact that it's so easy not to try/Just let the world go drifting by. For that song alone, they should have titled the production The Little Hobbit That Could.

  All this will mean little to non-Tolkien readers. But to those who are, you'll get an idea of the horrors you missed if you avoided this. Not to mention what I go through for this column.

  The relentless work and expense of renovating an old house has broken many a strong man and woman, but here is an old house horror story to end them all — about Harold and Edna and their brownstone, which saps their lives in a mysterious and chilling fashion.

  Real Estate

  BY

  JERROLD MUNDIS

  Harold found the first hundred dollars on the workbench in the basement. It was under a coffee can filled with old rusted 12-penny nails — a single bill, new, folded in half across the middle. It lay in the center of a thin rust circle left by the coffee can, which hadn't been moved in at least a year, maybe longer.

  He picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. He turned it over, held it up to the light. It seemed to be real.

  He made a pleased and baffled sound.

  He couldn't remember having put it there, could not in fact remember when he'd last handled a hundred dollar bill. His life didn't often bring him into contact with currency of such denomination. He was not moved to question his good fortune. Rather, he tucked the bill into his wallet with some haste, as if to secure it before it could vanish.

  He moved a jar of washers that had been beside the coffee can and looked under it. Then a paper sack of sheet-rock nails, then a series of dull alloy cans from which the labels had been soaked and removed and which held nails, screws, bolts, nuts. He looked beneath an old cigar box filled with various pieces of hardware. He found a couple of dead roaches, some sawdust and an old gum wrapper.

  He shrugged and went back to work, resentfully, on the faucet from Mrs. Jackson's bathroom sink, which he'd been promising her he would fix for the last five months.

  He remembered that day, the day he found the first hundred dollars, because he'd heard on the radio in the morning that the city council had announced another rise in property taxes.

  "My God," he said bitterly. "They're going to kill us. We can't take any more, we just can't."

  His wife Edna was sitting across the kitchen table carefully flexing her hands, trying to loosen the arthritic joints. She stopped. Her mouth began to frame words.

  "No," he said. "I don't want to hear it. We can't afford to go anyplace else. The house is all we have. If we give it up, we won't have anything."

  "But it costs us —"

  "I told you I don't want to hear it. I've worked for this house half my life. And now, by God, it's going to work for me. What do you think we'd do for money without it? How do you think we'd have to live?"

  She looked down at her coffee. "If we were someplace else," she said quietly, "maybe we wouldn't be so depressed. And if it were someplace drier or warmer, I could work more. The house brings in less each year. It's falling apart."

  "It's going to pay me back for all those years. There's no point if it doesn't. We'd lose everything, our whole lives."

  She didn't say anything more. They'd been having this conversation three or four years. Her words seemed only to make him more determined, and not just against her but against the house itself. It had become a balky animal he was going to make perform. At times he was almost frenzied about it. And when, in its age, some new portion failed, he raged at it and could think of nothing else for days. Last spring when the water pipe in Three-B burst and ruined the ceiling of the apartment below, he attacked the wall with a sledgehammer, as if he were beating the house, punishing it.

  "I'm going to work now," he said.

  He carried his breakfast dishes to the sink. He went into the hall and picked his windbreaker from a clothes hook and put it on. He stopped at the front door. Edna was in the kitchen entrance, watching him.

  "It'll be all right," he said with a tenderness that had become infrequent over the last decade. 'The house will take care of us. I'll see that it does."

  She nodded.

  He left, closing the door behind him. He walked up from the entrance well to the street level. The handrail was oxidizing and small flakes came off on his palm, discoloring it. The moorings were loose and the rail wobbled under his hand. The half-flight of stairs that led up from the sidewalk to the tenants' entrance were chipped and cracked. There wasn't much left of the first step, most of it having crumbled and broken away in the late 60s, abetted by vandals, one of whom had chucked a piece through a window.

  The mass of the old brownstone settled on his shoulders as he started off down the sidewalk. He didn't look back at it, but still, its image rose in his mind with sharp clarity. He knew every crack and seam, every gouge.

  each peel of paint on the corbels up beneath the roof, each taped-up crack in the glass, rotting window frame. The house had become logged into his nervous system in all its aspects and pieces, as if in a computer, and any section could be flashed onto his mind-screen in a moment: a diagram of the wiring, a readout on the state of the roof tar, the memory of one nail among thousands, the one that had plunged with a single hammer blow deep into the dry rot of a basement joist.

  He walked six blocks to the meat-market in which he had worked as a butcher for the last twenty years. The October sun was cheerful. But only in abstraction, high up in the empyrean, it was as if some enormous fine sieve lay over the city, or at least this part of it, filtering out each mote that could uplift the spirit or bring joy before it fell upon the streets, where it became nothing more than simple light. He passed an abandoned and plundered car on the way, a woman with a goiter rummaging in a trash can, several idle men sitting on stoops, some drinking from bottles in paper bags. He was
aware of all this, but only peripherally, and without emotional response. They had been part of the environment so long that he didn't remember on a daily basis a time when it had been different.

  But the pensioneers and dry old wispy hulks did bother him. Feeble, with papery skin and cloudy eyes and spotted hands, they shuffled and mumbled in front of the welfare hotels and rooming houses, they dozed on the benches on the dusty grassy medians of Lowery Avenue, they looked into store windows opening and closing their mouths like dying goldfish, walked in little mad circles. They bothered him because they were penniless and dying. They lived in tiny, lonely rooms. They didn't have enough to eat. They froze to death in the winter when the heat went out. They bothered him, they frightened him, because soon he and Edna could be like that. They were both so tired already. They couldn't work many years more. The house had to help them, had to pay them back.

  He worked all day cutting meat and weighing it, wrapping it in brown paper. The day uneventful, as nearly all of them were. He preferred it that way. When the vicissitudes were broken, it was usually unhappy — an argument about prices, shouting or tears over foodstamps, a robbery. On the way home he stopped at a housewares store and bought a box of rubber washers and a little roll of teflon tape because Mrs. Jackson, in Four-A, was now coming down every night to complain, interrupting his dinner, his television, his nap.

  That night while he was in the basement working on the faucet stem, he found the mint new hundred dollar bill under the coffee can full of rusty nails. He didn't tell Edna about it — there wasn't any need to. He managed all their money, including her small paycheck, and he forgot about it during the evening until the lights were out and he was in bed falling asleep.

  When he recalled it, he wakened a few moments and opened his eyes. Though it was too dark to be discerned, the room needed painting. But he didn't care about that now. He'd found a hundred dollars, and that was a very nice thing. He closed his eyes again and fell into a pleasant sleep.

  Harold had bought the house thirty years ago. He was so nervous the day he signed the papers that he stopped in the middle of writing his name and hurried out of the room into the hall. He touched the shoulder of a girl passing with an armful of files. "Excuse me. Please. Where is the bathroom?" He stayed until he'd purged his unstable insides entirely. Months passed before his digestion became normal again.

  His grandfather had lived above a stable. His father still lived in the same cramped three rooms in Newark in which Harold had been raised. His father's heart was bad. He gave Harold most of what he had saved, saying, "You might as well have your inheritance now."

  The money wasn't a lot, but still it was more than Harold could make in a year, in almost two years, and it intimidated him. His father had no advice — all he had known to do with money in his life was to save it against catastrophe. Harold put it in a bank, thought about it, talked about it with Edna nearly every night. His father died over that winter. They buried him, still unable to make a decision.

  In the late spring they finally pushed themselves into commitment and bought an old building, a four-story brownstone, on Dock Street, which was in a worn but nice and clean enough section of the city. If property lost its value, then nothing would be worth anything, and it wouldn't make any difference.

  They planned to occupy the bottom two floors and convert each of the top two into a floor-through apartment. Harold calculated that the rent would just about cover utilities, mortgage and taxes. They would live practically for free. The improvements would increase the natural rate of appreciation, and the house would become yearly more valuable, their equity rising rapidly. In the far future, when they finally retired and sold it, the capital they would recoup, buttressed by their social security checks, would keep them in fine comfort to the end of their lives.

  Harold was in his prime, and he set to work on the house with vigor and enthusiasm. Devoting nights and weekends to it, he estimated six or seven months to renovate the top floor.

  It took him thirteen months. When he pulled the ceiling down, he discovered that the insulation was damp and mildewed from various leaks and half a dozen joists had rotted nearly through. They had to be replaced, and the roof redone. Smashing through the plaster and lathing to open small rooms into larger, airier ones, was more difficult than he'd expected, and packing the debris into supermarket bags and carrying them down a few each night to deposit in different garbage cans up and down the street alone consumed much time and energy. The floors were bad, new partition walls had to be built, closets. Taping and spackling the fresh plasterboard accounted for a month in itself, and painting another. But at last it was done. The excitement of their first tenant and rent check resuscitated them. "It's coming back to us," Harold said jubilantly. "The house will pay for itself. It's going to work." They gave themselves a month's worth of holiday weekends and nights. Then they began again, on the interior stairs. After six weeks of clumsy attempts, Harold had to call in a professional carpenter, which consumed a sizeable piece of their modest savings. Nearly a year and a half passed before the third floor was ready. What time Harold saved with increasing skill, he lost and then lost again to flagging energy and the need to cannibalize scraps because they could not always afford new materials. They earmarked every extra dime of their paychecks for the house. Edna worked along with Harold most nights and weekends, fetching and carrying, doing the bulk of the spackling and all the primering and painting.

  They lived in Spartan dinginess three and a half years before they were able to begin the reconstruction of their own two floors.

  A month after he'd found the hundred dollar bill, Harold was dressing for the wedding of Edna's niece. He took the box with his formal shoes down from the shelf in the back of his closet and wiped a film of dust from it with a tissue. When he lifted the top, something wedged between it and the sidewall fell out onto the bedspread.

  He pursed his mouth. It was money, creased lengthwise. Two fifty dollar bills. He showed them to Edna, who was standing at her bureau.

  "What a nice surprise," she said. "You forgot they were there?"

  "I didn't know they were there. I don't remember them at all."

  "'Well, I didn't put them there. I'd remember a hundred dollars, I can tell you that."

  "I wore these shoes eight months ago. I haven't touched the box since then."

  Edna held two scarves against her dress, trying to decide. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," she said. "When you have your shoes on, would you check to see that Pappa's ready?"

  Edna's father had come to live with them. He was frail and walked with a cane. Harold had given him two rooms on the second floor. A little earlier, Harold and Edna had retreated to the bottom floor, planning to turn the second floor into a pair of efficiency apartments, to offset a tax rise and a jump in heating costs. There were a stove and refrigerator in his rooms, but Edna's father took most of his meals with them. Harold had been counting on both new apartments — he needed the money — but Edna's brother-in-law had died and her sister hadn't been able to take the old man in, as had been planned. It was hard, but Harold didn't resent him. Otherwise, there would be only the welfare hotels, and Harold was in too much horror of those to allow that to happen.

  The following month Harold found five twenty-dollar bills under a couch cushion. They were lying flat on the ticking over the springs. He called Edna in from the kitchen.

  "Look at these."

  She turned them over in her hands. "Is there something wrong with them? Are they counterfeit?"

  "No. No, they're fine. I found them under the cushion here. I don't know how they got there."

  "You must have hidden them."

  "I didn't. I tell you I didn't."

  "Why are you getting upset?"

  "Because I didn't put them there, damn it. And I didn't put the hundred dollars I found last month into the shoebox either. And the month before that I found a hundred dollar bill in the basement, and I don't remember putting that there e
ither."

  Edna touched his face. "Ssshh. Ssshh, now. Finding three hundred dollars is no reason to get upset."

  "You don't understand."

  "Yes, I do. You found three hundred dollars and I'm going to thank God in my prayers tonight."

  A month later, he found three twenties and four tens in a Readers Digest book of condensed novels. He was unnerved.

  Edna looked at the bills and frowned, as they did on television when confronted with a puzzle. She went, "Hhmm."

  Harold put the money into the cardboard sleeve containing the passbook to his bank account. He was almost afraid of the bills. These last two weeks he'd been working hard plastering the holes the tenants had left in the walls of one of the apartments and repainting. He'd planned to relax and read a book, something he did only two or three times a year. But after he tucked the money away, he couldn't keep his mind on the words, it kept turning back to the money — four hundred dollars now — and so he went down to the basement and took a plane, and a hammer and an old screwdriver to knock out the hinge pins, and climbed the stair to Mr. Wentworth's apartment to work on the bathroom door, which was sticking.

  He didn't finish and get the tools away until late. Edna was asleep. But she woke up some when he got into bed.

  "Maybe you hid the money before we got robbed," she said. "Maybe it's left over from then."

  "No," he said. "I'd remember. I'm sure I'd remember."

  He used to keep money in the house, in. secret places. For vague emergencies, which never occurred. They had been burglarized, and the detective who'd come to investigate told them they were foolish, even though the hidden cash hadn't been discovered this time. Burglars knew much more about the clever places people hid things than the people did, he said. They were only asking for trouble. Harold had stopped hiding money.