Eloise said to Kay, “I hope we have enough for three? Or if not, maybe you could run to the market and get something? I should have called, I know, but it was sort of last-minute.”
The man said to Kay, “Eloise never remembers anything. I’m Gordon Miles, by the way.” He spoke to her respectfully as if she were a much older woman.
His deference felt like a punch in the stomach. She was a quarter century older than Eloise, no longer in the same league, men-wise. When she had been Eloise’s age, she had her pick of men like Gordon — she had blown through many of them, because it seemed the supply was endless, and her looks a guarantee. Even now, without Gordon and Eloise, she could have pretended.
“I think we’re fine — I roasted a whole chicken,” Kay said. “The recipe’s from Gourmet; it’s delicious.”
“Kay’s meals are yummy,” Eloise said to Gordon.
“I’m looking forward to that,” he replied as Kay returned to the kitchen. “But where’s your stuff?”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s downstairs, and we’re working on that,” Eloise whispered, but loudly enough for Kay to hear.
Gordon stayed the night and then showed up the next night, and after a few days, he moved his stuff in, too. “Hope it’s not a problem,” he said to Kay.
Kay said, “Well, of course not, but it must be a little crowded.” She laughed nervously at the implication of crowded.
“Well, you see, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about. You see, we could pay the entire mortgage — and you could move into the smaller room. Of course, we’ll pay for the food, too, and maybe kick in a little extra for the inconvenience?”
Kay went stiff and then felt loose again. She sat down on the sofa. “And my furniture?” she asked.
“No problem storing it — the basement’s big, and well, let’s face it, you don’t really need an office. I mean, with laptops and all,” he said, as if Kay had a professional life.
“You don’t want any of it?” she asked.
He touched her grandmother’s brass candlesticks, twirling his index finger around its base. “We like these. We’d like to buy them.” And then he tapped some other objects — an antique roll-top desk, a blue glass coffee table — and lightly stroked them, like pets. “A few thousand — you and Eloise can work out a number. And then we can store the rest, or maybe it’s time to get rid of some of it. I mean, all of us get us caught up in junk.”
The next day, Gordon and Eloise moved the rest of their own furniture into the house and wrote Kay a check. They allowed her to store some of her objects in the basement, but only some — the rest were carted away by a friendly junk removal company whose employees wore uniforms. By the time they left, Kay saw that some things, mistakenly, had been discarded — but it was impossible for the company to retrieve them. Picture albums, toys, vases — all had been thrown out.
That night, Kay slept in her new small room. She tried to block out the sounds of Gordon and Eloise as they moved around. She imagined whispers and laughter, and in her dreams she saw her old objects and even her family as it once had been. She woke several times in the night — outside it rained heavily and she was grateful for the roof.
The check had almost wiped out the debt, but not quite. Still, she said to herself, it was a step in the right direction, even if it felt like a fall.
“It’s good to purge every once in a while,” said Gordon.
“Absolutely,” Eloise said, as Kay served her whole wheat toast and jam. She handed Kay a list of chores for the week, which, by now, included cleaning Eloise’s room as well as the rest of the house, along with oil changes and ironing and picking up prescriptions and dry cleaning, and purchasing luxury wines. “I’d love nice fresh salmon tonight, Kay, if you can find it, maybe with baby potatoes from the Farmer’s Market?”
With Gordon around, it seemed awkward to have a trio at the table — and she could hardly make demands since Eloise paid the entire mortgage, plus incidentals.
Gordon said, “We should have a Halloween party! That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Pumpkins and games and, well, Eloise and I would like our friends to see where we live now. Maybe around fifteen or so, that won’t be too much, will it?” He seemed to be soliciting Kay’s opinion.
“I love parties,” said Kay.
“We’ll need invitations,” reminded Eloise. “I hate electronic invites. Paper only, okay?” She handed Kay a guest list — already printed out, in alphabetical order.
Kay took it with pleasure. She adored parties, and even when she could ill afford them, she loved giving dinner parties of every kind and for every reason; birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, anniversaries, reunions — and now, Halloween.
“Costumes, of course,” said Kay. “You can’t have Halloween without costumes!” She giggled at the thought of skeletons and demons.
Gordon said, “Well, we’ll buy you one, too.” He smothered his toast in blackberry jam, and started reading a newspaper.
Eloise said lightly, “And maybe later, you’ll have another party, for your friends, Kay.”
“Of course — Kay can have her own party any time,” Gordon said, turning the page.
Halloween fell on a Friday night. Kay decorated the house with pumpkin lanterns. She bought bags of candy for the trick-or-treat children and filled them with Milky Way bars and candy corn. She glazed apples with caramel and hung paper skeletons with maniacal grins up and down the hallway. Her dinner menu was a rich coq au vin with nice crusty French bread.
Before she was about to go downstairs for her final preparations, Gordon handed her a dress on a hanger. “For tonight,” he said.
“Ah, my costume,” she smiled. She went into her small room, and she took it out. It was a maid’s costume, a short black dress with a square white apron that tied in the back.
When the guests came, she greeted them in her little dress, and served them her platters of hors d’oeuvres. She took their coats and hung them up — she prided herself on being a gracious hostess. The guests hardly took notice of her.
Kay had set up the dinner as a buffet. She handed out plates and silverware, and smiled at her masked guests. Her own costume made her feel flirty, with its cute short skirt.
In the kitchen, one of the guests — a tall man with silver hair — asked, “So you’re the fantastic maid Eloise raves about?”
Kay said coyly, “I’m not a maid.” She quickly wiped the counter, since he had poured wine on it.
He asked, “So, what kind of work do you do?”
“Well, the cooking and errands, and well, everyday kind of chores. But it’s a temporary thing, you know, this is my house.”
Though his mask, the man’s eyes went blank. “Interesting,” he said and walked away.
As the guests sat down, Kay counted the chairs around the dining room table. The table was one seat short, even though she had set up the chairs — but she must have counted wrong, or perhaps there was an extra guest. She started to push a chair back into its place when she heard Eloise’s rock-hard voice.
“Kay, this is lovely — you can leave us alone now. Everything’s perfect.” Eloise grinned like the skeletons and sipped blood-red Cabernet.
“And take the rest of the night off,” added Gordon.
As she headed upstairs, she heard the guests chanting, “Happy Halloween!”
__________
This story was originally published in The Ear Hustler’s Halloween Issue, 2011
Alan Seeger was born in San Francisco, California, fifty-four years ago. He lived in Denver, Colorado for a couple of years, and then moved to Oklahoma where he spent most of his life. After ten years in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, he now lives on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he has been since 2007.
Seeger’s first novel, PINBALL, the first book in the Gatespace Trilogy, was published in January 2013; the second volume, REPLAY, was published in September 2013. The third and final volume, TILT, is expected in October of 2014
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Julia, the protagonist of this story, happens to be the sister of one of the characters in REPLAY, who will also play an important part in TILT.
KNOCK, KNOCK
Alan Seeger
It was nearly seven o’clock on a Friday evening in the late summer, and Julia Rhodes McMahon was sitting in the living room of her rural home in the mountains of Colorado. She was alone in the house; her husband Adam had been in Chicago on a business trip for three days. He was supposed to arrive home soon. Julia felt a pang of loneliness; it was the first time they had been apart overnight since prior to their wedding sixteen months before.
The house was small; more a cabin, really, than a house. The exterior was sheathed in worn redwood planks weathered a silvery grey by the cold Colorado winters, and it was roofed with cedar shakes. It included a single bedroom with an adjoining bathroom, plus a living room and kitchen that were separated only by an island containing the sink. It was all that Julia and Adam needed at the present time, and she adored the amazing view from the small back porch, which looked out over a vista that led upwards to the snow-capped Rockies in the distance.
Tonight Julia had cheated a bit on her normally health-conscious diet and made herself a frozen pizza. She’d started to pop open a can of Diet Coke, then decided to indulge herself just a little bit more and poured a glass of red wine. If it was good enough for the Italians, it was good enough for her.
She scrolled through the satellite television menu until she ran across an intriguing entry: Bride of the Vampire, a low-budget British flick with an unknown cast and a deliciously creepy ambience filled with foggy moors, spider-webbed passageways and dimly lit corridors. It was an homage to the classic Universal and Hammer vamp films, but so ineptly directed that it was almost-but-not-quite a parody. It was, to put it simply, a bad movie — and that was just the kind of film that Julia loved. She made a bowl of microwave popcorn and settled in on the sofa.
The movie was a nice mix of wonderfully creepy and enjoyably campy at first, but after a while it became tediously repetitive and more than a little predictable. The leading character, a blonde who was a real Lucy Westenra type, seemed to fall for every devious trick that the vampire in the movie laid out for her. At first Julia felt like calling out to her, telling her, “Hey, girl, don’t go there,” or “He’s gonna nail you if you go out on the terrace,” but after about thirty minutes the movie had settled into such predictability that she was rolling her eyes and felt like cheering for Count What’s-His-Name instead. After all, she was sure that he needed his blood, and if Lucy-lady was too stupid to protect her pretty little neck — not to mention the other obvious charms that the movie put on display through her filmy negligee — from the vampire’s fangs, Julia figured she deserved whatever she got.
There was a good reason that she’d never heard of this movie before; it wasn’t fun bad, it just plain sucked, and not like the Count.
Another hour went by with no sign of Adam. Julia tried calling his cell phone, but it went directly to voice mail; she figured he’d forgotten to turn it back on after he got off the airplane.
Julia finally turned off the television at about 10:30 PM and got ready for bed. She stripped and walked into the bathroom, turned on a hot, stinging shower, and lathered her blonde hair. The thought occurred to her that she was glad that she hadn’t decided to watch Psycho; Julia realized that she might have been just a little bit creeped out by being alone in a house so late at night, taking a shower.
Then she realized that, despite the movie having been laughably bad, she actually was feeling a little bit spooky. Julia finished her shower, wrapped herself in an oversized, heavy duty bath towel, and walked into the bedroom.
She looked at the wedding photo that hung on the wall of their bedroom and felt that lonely feeling stir again. “Where are you?” she said to photograph-Adam.
Julia had grown up as the oldest of three kids in a middle-class family in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and cruised through high school on her good looks. Her blue eyes and blonde hair had pretty much qualified her to wrap any guy she wanted around her little finger, and she had once thought she’d wanted nothing more than to win Homecoming Queen her senior year and marry the quarterback of the football team, but that had all gone south when she discovered that her quarterback was doing the slutty little bitch that she had thought was her best friend.
After graduation, she decided that college wasn’t such a bad option; her little sister Sarah, who had inherited their mother’s genes for auburn-red hair, green eyes and a razor-sharp mind, planned to go to Oberlin College. Julia figured that if she buckled down, she could at least go to one of the state colleges; maybe become a teacher. She wound up at Kent State and graduated with an education degree six grueling years later, accepting a teaching position in her home town of Wapakoneta. Her brainy little sister had graduated from Oberlin the year before and was working on her master’s at Ohio State, but Julia had no plans to follow in little sister’s footsteps just yet; she had met a brainy beanstalk named Adam McMahon and knew he was the man for her.
They dated for nearly five years before Adam finally got around to popping the question. Their families both insisted on an elaborate wedding, so they picked a date in the late spring two years later and Julia continued to teach. She didn’t mind; she found it very rewarding. Soon Adam had a firm offer for a better job in Colorado; they continued their relationship on a long distance basis, and after the wedding, Julia finished the semester, resigned her teaching position and moved into the cabin in the mountains.
Now Julia wished there was someone here with her, because she felt very alone and very vulnerable. She went into the kitchen, retrieved her cell phone from its charger and dialed Adam’s number again, but once again the call went straight to voice mail.
She decided to try her sister. Sarah had landed a job with a research laboratory in St. Louis that was studying the nature of time, and despite the fact that she was a cute redhead that attracted lots of looks from the guys, Julia knew that she didn’t go out much. She dialed her number. We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again. Hmmm. She redialed but got the same recording. She had the impulse to call her mother, but her parents were in their 60s and she didn’t want to worry them. She put the phone back on the charger and walked into the bedroom.
What she saw made her stop and stare.
The little 13-inch bedroom TV was on, and was showing the first scene of Bride of the Vampire where the Count was trying to seduce the girl.
The problem was that a) that part of the movie had been over more than an hour ago, and wasn’t on the schedule to be repeated, and b) she hadn’t turned on the bedroom television.
Julia reached out to turn off the little TV just as the vampire looked into the camera and whispered, “I’m coming for you, my dear…”
She clicked the television off and jumped back as if she’d received an electrical shock. It’s all right, Julia; it’s only a movie, she thought. But how had the little TV turned itself on, and why was it showing a scene that was early in a film that had been shown two hours ago and was not scheduled to be repeated anytime soon?
She shrugged and walked over to her dresser. She dropped the towel, standing and enjoying the feeling of the cool air on her bare skin. She pulled one of her husband’s tee shirts and a lacy pair of panties out of the drawers and slipped them on. She reassured herself that Adam would be home soon. It couldn’t be too much longer.
Julia’s stomach rumbled a bit, and she decided to get another slice of pizza before she lay down to read for a while. She walked into the kitchen, plopped a slice on a paper plate and put the rest into the fridge. When she turned from the refrigerator and started to walk back out of the tiny kitchen into the living room, the TV was on again. What’s more, there was a familiar image on the screen, yet it was not one she’d seen before.
She walked into the living room and stood, transfixed, watching the television.
It was the Count, the vampire from the movie, but he wasn’t acting out any of the scenes that she had seen when she was watching it earlier. All that was visible on the screen was his face, and he seemed to be watching Julia very closely.
As she gazed at the image, the vampire on the screen suddenly winked at her, said, “Knock, knock!” tossed back his head and let out a hearty laugh.
That broke the seeming spell that had been cast on Julia. She snatched up the remote from the coffee table and thumbed the power button. The screen went dark.
Julia was breathing heavily, as if she’d just finished running a 100-yard dash. Her heart was pounding. She realized, much to her annoyance, that she was genuinely frightened — scared out of her wits was more like it.
Behind her, she heard a voice from the bedroom. It was saying her name. It sounded so familiar, so loving… Adam? Had he sneaked in while she was in the shower?
She walked into the little bedroom, only to see that the little TV was on again, and the vampire’s face was there, mocking her. He seemed to look at her and said, in Adam’s voice: “Hey, sweetheart.”
Julia froze for a moment, then whirled around and grabbed the nearest heavy object she saw, a large stoneware pot that she and Adam had purchased at a gift shop at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico while they were on their honeymoon. Before she had time to think otherwise, she had hurled the pot toward the grinning image of the vampire; there was a crash and a sizzle of dying electrical parts and the television and shards of pottery went crashing to the floor.
She immediately ran to the living room and saw that the television there was flickering to life; she yanked the power cord out of the wall, then stood there, savoring the silence for a moment.
A moment was all it lasted.
The little radio she kept on the kitchen counter, the stereo in the living room and her cell phone all lit up simultaneously, blasting the same spooky music that had been the background for the film.
Adam’s voice blared out as well, overriding the music: “Juuuuu-lia,” it called in a teasing tone.
13 Bites Volume I (13 Bites Anthology Series) Page 9
