Crawlers

by John Shirley

  She had a psychology Ph.D., and maybe she was using it on Adair, here in her office at the high school, but it didn’t feel that way. Adair’d had several meetings with Ms. Santavo, back when she thought her parents were going to get a divorce and she hadn’t been able to concentrate on school stuff. Ms. Santavo had always been really nice and she’d done some kind of therapeutic talking-through that wasn’t really part of her job, just to try to help. Ms. Santavo was good at making Adair feel like an adult working things out with another adult.

  On her desk, Ms. Santavo had a lot of those little toys for grown-ups you got at Earth Gifts and places like that—the miniature Zen sand garden, the baseball-size version of the globe with purple lightning jumping toward your hand when you touched it, the panel with colored sand that made artful-looking shapes when you turned it upside down and shook it, the frame with tiny magnetized diamond shapes of chrome that you could rearrange into any shape you wanted. Adair was playing with that one, absently, as they spoke after school.

  “I know what you mean,” Ms. Santavo was saying, sipping a can of Diet 7UP. “I am not real likely to walk up to my own mother and say, ‘Mom, I think you’re acting very strangely’—not unless it’s really necessary. If she seemed to be developing Alzheimer’s, I might have to say something like that. It would be really hard.”

  Adair was thinking about what Ms. Santavo said, but her hands were shaping the magnetized metal pieces into an almost familiar outline. A woman with long hair, in rough silvery silhouette. “It’s not just . . . being afraid of how she’ll feel about it. Hurting her feelings. It’s . . . hard to explain. I don’t have any good reason. That’s what’s, like, freaking me out. Being afraid of them for no really good reason. That’s why I thought, maybe I should see a doctor. Maybe, there’s something wrong with my mind. Maybe. I mean, feeling like your parents aren’t human anymore. Both of them, not just my mom—that’s just sick, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, you know what, before I’d jump to the conclusion that you’re sick, I’d check out the less drastic possibilities. Like that there might just be a misunderstanding about what’s going on. Look, let’s have your mom come in—talk to her, the two of us. What the heck, if that doesn’t work, we’ll see about doctors.”

  Adair felt pinned to a board, like a butterfly. She felt like she had to say yes. But she didn’t want to. “Yeah, sure.”

  Ms. Santavo picked up the phone, called Adair’s house. “Hello, this is Ms. Santavo, calling about Adair. No, she’s fine, I just wanted to know if we could arrange a time to meet, talk over some issues that seem to be bothering her? No, it’s not an emergency but I think the sooner the better.

  “Well, sure, if you like. Okay. That’ll be all right. See you then.”

  She hung up, frowning—and then remembered to smile for Adair. “So, a preliminary step—your dad wants to meet with me alone.”

  “But you talked to my mom.”

  Ms. Santavo shrugged and smiled. “Well, she seemed to have been anticipating the meeting. She said your dad planned to come, instead.”

  Adair nodded. She felt like warning Ms. Santavo about something. But she didn’t. Because she wasn’t sure what the warning should be—or even why she wanted to make it.

  It was 9:53 P.M., and Vinnie had come out to listen to the noise from the bar—the way he sometimes did at night, never going in, just listening—and he was disappointed. Usually he heard laughing, arguing, people whooping, television noise from the ESPN that was always on because it was a sports bar, and music. And, of course, the sounds of glasses clinking. But it was so quiet in there now.

  Vinnie screwed up his courage and looked through the window. The bartender, Ross, a stout balding guy with fading blue tattoos on his forearms, was standing behind the bar with his hands in his pockets, looking up at a football game on the TV over the rows of bottles.

  Except for Ross, the bar was empty. Where was everyone? Vinnie’d always felt a sense of communication and sharing with the people in the bar, even though they usually weren’t aware he was out here listening on the sidewalk.

  He didn’t look at his watch. He knew without looking that it was exactly 9:59.

  Instead he looked up at the streetlight. Moths fluttered around it. You didn’t usually see them much this time of year, but there they were. But they weren’t batting at the lamp the way they usually did, leaving strobe trails of randomness behind them. Now the strobe trails were all in precise patterns, like pictures of electrons circling an atomic nucleus.

  As if sensing his puzzlement, two of the dusty white fliers detached from their mothy orbit and flew down at him like dive-bombing hawks—not like fluttery moths at all. They streaked down in straight trajectories. When he stepped back from them they stopped in front of his face, one moth in front of each of Vinnie’s eyes, hovering there in a way he’d never seen a moth do.

  Looking into their little moth faces, he saw tiny little jointed metal sensors emerging from their eyes.

  He thought he heard a voice, then. “This one for the All of Us?”

  And another voice replying, “No. His programming is problematically atypical. Seven Meridian green, polarized. He is suitable only for parts.”

  Somehow he was aware that they weren’t talking to each other. He was hearing something in his mind that the moths were hearing, too.

  The moths were like remote eyes for the things that were talking.

  One of the voices said, “Who shall we send?”

  “They are busy with conversions. There is no urgency with this one. He is socially externalized.”

  Socially externalized?

  Angrily, Vinnie clapped his two hands together in front of his face, crushing the moths.

  But he knew it wouldn’t help. Two more moths detached from their lamp orbit, dived impossibly hawklike down, on their altered, metal-threaded wings, and followed him home.

  15

  December 12

  Adair and Cal were outside on the broken glider, both of them with hands in their pockets against the foggy bite of a December morning. It was a Sunday.

  Adair watched ghosts of fog lift off the roof as the sun brightened. The wisps lifted up—as if trying to get to heaven, she thought—and then they vanished as if judged and found wanting.

  Cal kicked at an old cat toy that had belonged to Silkie. Then looked over at the spot where Silkie was buried, under the dormant rosebush.

  “Sometime I wish it would get really cold here,” Cal said. “It never snows. It’s all bland and shit. I wish everything would be covered under snow. Just blanketed over, like all dead white.”

  Adair said abstractedly, “It’s like that song, ‘I’m Only Happy When It Rains.’ Only you want snow to be happy. So you’re never happy because it never snows.”

  But she was thinking about Mom. Sometimes it was like Mom’d been trying to tell them something and never could say it. Impulsively, she said, “My counselor told me to look for other explanations for what seems wrong with Mom and Dad besides . . . whatever it is. Like how they were about my computer and . . . stuff. So I guess, they’re acting weird because they’re thinking about a divorce? I mean, like they’re back to thinking about it?”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” He kicked angrily at the grass. Then he took a piece of stick gum from his pocket, started to unwrap it, but it was old and stale and the wrapping was stuck to it. “I think they’re lying to us about shit. About where they go. About . . .” He shrugged.

  “Well,” Adair said, “come on, shit, Cal, you were acting all, ‘Don’t say there’s anything wrong with them, they’re happy now.’ And now you’re all, ‘They’re lying to us.’ ”

  “Okay, so, maybe, I’m not so sure now.” He looked at her. He looked back at his shoes. Then suddenly he stood up. “Come on,” he said decisively. “I want to show you something in the attic.”

  “The attic? What were you doing up there?”

  “Looking for some old scuba gear of mine. I was gonna g
o out and find a job without Dad, because he hasn’t been taking me with him. If he’s been going out to the boat at all. Which I don’t think he has, because I rode out and looked at it and it just hadn’t been moved. I mean, you can tell. So I went to the attic—oh, just fucking come on.”

  Adair growled in irritation. He was always ordering her around.

  But she followed him.

  The entrance to the attic was a ladder built into the wall in the pantry. He climbed up, pushed open the little door near the ceiling, and climbed through to the little catwalk. She followed him only after she saw that he had switched on the naked lightbulb.

  The attic ceiling was low, so they had to walk stooped over; they shuffled like a couple of knuckle-dragging apes to the center of the space, past a lot of old scuba gear and cobwebby boxes and layers of insulation.

  Cal knelt by a suitcase in a corner, opened it, and pointed. In the suitcase were stacks of hundred-dollar bills, all in bill wrappers, and an empty bag that said BANK OF QUIEBRA. Some of the stacks had been torn open and reduced to smaller piles. Adair squatted down and picked up a bill. It looked real. She dropped it and rocked back on her heels.

  “Oh, shit, Cal. What’s it from?”

  “I’ve been . . . scared to ask. But I’m going to fucking ask them now.”

  “Cal, I don’t think we should. I’m scared to.”

  “Why?” He didn’t seem to be asking as if he didn’t know the answer. It was more like he wanted it to be confirmed.

  But she only shook her head and swallowed. And then coughed— the dust up here always did that to her.

  “Come on,” he said. “This is bullshit. We have to know. I’m going to ask Mom. Sometimes she seems like . . . she wants to tell me something.”

  They went back to the little attic door, climbed down the ladder, and found Mom and Dad in the garage. They were side by side at Dad’s workbench, tinkering together with what looked like a homemade satellite dish, a lot like the one Mr. Garraty had built.

  Cal stared at it for a moment. “Whatcha building there, Dad?” he asked.

  Dad was screwing a motherboard to the back of what looked like the old wok Mom had used for cooking maybe twice—the “dish” for the satellite channel pickup, Adair guessed. He’d punched holes through the wok with some tools from the boat that he usually used for repairing scuba tanks.

  Without looking up, Dad answered, “I’m making a satellite-station antenna. The specs were in Scientific American.”

  “I heard it was Popular Science,” Adair muttered.

  “Yes, it was in Popular Mechanics, too,” Dad said. He finished tightening a nut and put his hand out—and Mom handed him a soldering iron.

  Adair looked at her mom, who began unspooling some solder. Dad used the soldering iron, so that a little curl of smoke rose. Then he put it aside with a grunt and crossed the garage to rummage through a box of loose electronic parts.

  Adair prodded Cal—and he nodded. Whispered to their mom. “Mom, can I talk to you?”

  She didn’t respond. Cal persisted, putting his hands on his mom’s shoulders, in a way he never had before.

  “Mom.” He looked into her eyes. He squeezed her shoulders. “Mom, I saw them bring that suitcase. That man from the bank? I saw the suitcase full of money in the attic.” Cal licked his lips, and went on. “Hundred-dollar bills. And I saw the Garratys get a visit at night from those people, too—and get another suitcase. And somebody reamed out the bank. There’s something going on, Mom. Some people are up to some shit, and you guys have gotten into it. I thought maybe, payoffs from the government, maybe there’s a radiation leak or something from that crash, some shit like that, and, I don’t know, they just took over the local bank to pay people off. Mom, come on, goddamn it.”

  Her lips were moving but nothing came out.

  Then she froze—and turned her head fast, queasily fast, to look at Dad rushing at them.

  Dad made himself look angry; that’s how it seemed to Adair. He was doing angry. “Cal! Leave your mother alone!”

  Cal took a step back from his mom, and her face cleared and she smiled sunnily and she walked out of the garage.

  “We were holding some money for some people,” Dad said, the anger dropping away as if it had never been there, replaced with weary reasonableness. “It’s to do with a special real estate transaction. You wouldn’t understand. The IRS would make it impossible if we didn’t do it this way. We’ve turned the money over. I don’t want any more whining from you kids about computers. You’ve both been spoiled for years. That’s going to end. I promise you it’s going to end, when—” He broke off. He seemed to consider, then made a dismissive gesture, with a wry expression on his face. “Look, forget it. You kids go on out and have some fun, okay?”

  He went back into the garage, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Cal turned to Adair, and it scared her to see tears starting in his eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him cry. “You see?” he said, his voice breaking. “That bag . . .”

  “What bag?”

  “That fucking Bank of Quiebra bag shows everything he said was a lie. A fucking lie.”

  Then he went into the house, and after a moment she heard his bedroom door slam. Then System of a Down came blasting from his CD player. She could tell when Cal was in a good mood if he was listening to his rave-mix CDs. But he listened to bands like System of a Down and Linkin Park when he was in a bad mood. He turned it up so loud it began to distort, which was, she muttered, “Hella loud,” and she waited for her mom and dad to complain.

  But the door to the garage never opened. They never said a word.

  December 11

  “So how’s your investigation going?” Bert asked, as he and Lacey got out of the car. They were in the parking lot of an apartment complex along the beach, looking to find her a place not far from his.

  “Actually—” She lowered her voice. “—I’d rather not talk about it till we’re somewhere more private.”

  Bert shivered. The sky seemed a noncolor, horizon to horizon, maybe technically gray, with a thin cloud cover. He led Lacey up the imitation-redwood steps over a rain-darkened wood-chip-and-bark-dust embankment, toward the manager’s office.

  He felt a small thrill, going with Lacey to help her find a place to live. It wasn’t going with her to find a place for them to live together—but it wasn’t all that far from it. There was something intimate in it.

  A week’s worth of mail was piled on the gray synthetic carpet in front of the door of the manager’s office. Bert peered through the glass pane to one side; the office was empty, looked deserted. The phone on the desk looked as if it had been taken apart.

  They heard a thump from the roof. “Sounds like someone’s on the roof,” Lacey muttered.

  They moved back till they could see up over the roof ’s edge. The manager—a Latino guy in coveralls, with big dark eyes and gray hair and a mustache—was familiar to Bert; he had once been the handyman for Bert’s own condo complex.

  “Hey, Jaime!” Bert shouted, waving from the little square of grass that passed for a lawn.

  Jaime looked down at him incuriously. He was setting something up on the roof, some kind of antenna. “What you want?” he asked flatly.

  “Your sign says you have some rentals available. Lady here would like to see them.”

  “She can have one. The doors of the empty ones are . . .”

  His voice was lost in a gust of wind. The murmur of the sea. “What?”

  “They’re unlocked. Electricity is on. She can move in anytime she want.”

  “What? The application? The price?”

  “No application. Townhouse seven or eight. Twelve hundred a month. Leave checks in box. That’s all. I cannot talk now.”

  Bert and Lacey looked at each other, then at Jaime on the roof. Bert shrugged. “It would seem you have a place to live, if you like the way it looks—and they’re all pretty much alike.”

  �
��You must have a lot of pull with him. Not even a credit check.” She shook her head in wonder.

  Bert shrugged and they walked up to the building to look through the empty condos. But he thought, I hardly knew that guy at all.

  They walked around the complex. From here you could see more of the roof—and other roofs.

  “Will you look at that,” Lacey muttered, pointing.

  He nodded. “I’ll be goddamned.”

  As far as they could see, weird little homemade antennas of varying size and shape and sophistication sprouted from rooftops. Some were satellite dishes—but modified, strangely wired-up satellite dishes. Others were made out of odds and ends—pots and lids and even hub-caps. Transmitters or receivers of some kind, all pointing in one direction, and none of them aimed at the sky.

  One on every roof.

  “You remember that little electronic transmitter, Bert?” Lacey said, after they’d stared awhile. “I think I saw one on that thing the manager was putting up on the roof back there. But it was too far away. I can’t be sure.”

  He glanced back at the apartment building. “He’s getting down now.”

  “He is? Good! Come on!”

  “Lacey . . .”

  But she’d already started trotting, half running back toward the building, well ahead of him. In a few minutes she was up the aluminum ladder, still leaning against the building.

  By the time he started up the ladder after her, she was already climbing down.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she hissed. “I need a drink.”

  They headed back to the car, got in, and drove back to his place. “It was there?” he asked. “The transmitter thing?”

  She nodded. “It was there.”

  December 11, evening

  Adair was going out to the sidewalk, to walk over to Siseela’s, when she heard the music from the basement. It was sixties music. Like Dad and Mom had listened to, sometimes, after they’d drunk a little Chablis. Feeling a faint lift of hope, she went around the side of the house and into the backyard.