Static! Page 2

  But Brown didn’t say anything and Nick’s poking around in corners didn’t lead to anything tangible. Finally Nick just chalked up the agent’s tension to a hot day and a frustrating job.

  “You got a deal,” he said after a long, slow tour of the house, its two bedrooms, cramped kitchen, laughably small bathroom (but then who wants to entertain there), and back to the living room.

  Pressing the pen boldly into the paper, he signed the rental agreement.

  That’s when Nick first saw her name.

  Emilia Greer.

  Nick knew his Faulkner. He didn’t care for much of it—anyway, Faulkner was four hundred years too late, as far as Nick’s interests were concerned—but “Greer” was close enough to “Grierson” to trigger his memory. The name clicked the instant he saw it scrawled on the line marked “owner.” When he got to her address, he looked up at the agent.

  Brown’s eyes had been following Nick’s. He obviously knew where Nick was on the contract, and he read the address along with Nick: 1477 Greensward Lane.

  He smiled—a forced smile if ever I saw one, Nick thought grimly—and gestured with one thumb over his shoulder, out the spotted dining-room window toward the house next door. It was some years older than the rental, larger at first sight but more ramshackle, shaded with vines twining through the shadows of the eaves so thickly that it seemed as if they—rather than any internal skeleton of studs and plaster—were holding the entire thing up. From a distance, it looked dark and…God help him, but Nick actually thought the word foreboding, like he was the faint-hearted heroine of some bad nineteenth-century pseudo-Gothic horror-pulp. He shivered and inadvertently wrinkled his nose, as if testing the air for the telltale odors of quicklime, decay, death, and, just possibly, a single disintegrating rose.

  He looked across the room to see Brown staring at him. “Convenient, eh?” the agent said quickly—too quickly. The forced smile broadened, even though it still didn’t quite reach Brown’s eyes. “Yep, the landlady lives right next door. Sweet old thing, she is. A bit crippled, won’t bother you a minute. Doesn’t even want to check out the new tenants, left that all up to me.”

  Nick stared at Brown, holding his face as impassive as possible.

  “It’s handy for repairs,” the agent continued, as if struggling to make up for some ineluctable deficit in his presentation. “Just call across the fence. Real handy. Whadda ya think?”

  His voice sounded odd, tight. He also didn’t look at the neighboring house—just pointed over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Nick said after a longish pause, sounding oddly reluctant even to himself, “real handy.”

  Brown waited without speaking, his eyes focused on Nick. A bead of sweat started just below the man’s hairline—were those hair-plugs, Nick thought wildly—slipped down his rough skin, paused at the eyebrow, then slipped further along the cheekbone through an impenetrable five o’clock shadow and disappeared into his faintly stained collar like an insect burrowing its way into the living heart of a tree.

  “Convenient,” Nick finally murmured.

  There was another long silence. No chatter about the paneling or the tiles or the handy location—no “just a couple a’ blocks from stores ’n’ schools ’n’ such.” The omissions should have set warning bells clanging in Nick’s mind—“the jangling and the wrangling”—but they didn’t. Nick was too relieved to find something—anything—to keep his budget from looking like a fatally wounded survivor from a war zone.

  So he signed.

  A quick flourish of the pen. That quickly, and it was over.

  At first he noticed nothing unusual at the house next to his on Greensward...except that he never once saw, really saw Emilia Greer. The only time he came close was on the first day of each month, at 6:00 p.m. on the dot, rain or shine, smog or fog, when—plain white legal-sized envelope gripped firmly in hand—he trudged up the stress-fractured concrete walk to her house.

  The first time, he clumped up half a dozen steps, crossed her wide, vine-choked porch, and pressed an old-fashioned round buzzer hanging lopsidedly on the door jamb. One buzz—more electrical crackle than musical tone. Before he could jab the button again, the door opened. Startled, he jumped back a step, then caught himself before overbalancing and recovered his poise. There had been no creeeeeak like there used to be on the only-in-the-boondocks reruns of that ancient radio show—Inner Sanctum, but Nick had called it Inter Sanctum when he was a kid wishing he could stay up and listen it instead of just hearing snatches it from his bedroom where he was safely hidden with his pocket flashlight beneath the sheet, wishing It, whatever It was for that week, would go away.

  No, no creak or anything so melodramatic. Just a thin line of darkness opening on deeper darkness, but Nick’s skin crawled and for a moment, a mad instant, he wanted to run back to his rental, pack whatever he could cram into his one scratched suitcase, and head like living blazes for home. His real home way up north.

  In that instant, a thin, arthritically gnarled hand thrust out, claw-like, to grasp the envelope containing the rent check and an itemized receipt for minor repairs. Fifty dollars for the Roto-Rooter® man, $26.50 to replace a broken pane in the bathroom window.

  That was it.

  Before Nick could speak, could move, could do more than draw a single shaky breath, the hand withdrew, the door whispered closed, the dark slit sealed itself seamlessly with the ease of a Hollywood special effect, and the door became as one with the jamb.

  Stunned, Nick backed down the step and across the lawn, unwilling to let his eyes shift from the old house, with its single, cyclopean window hanging above the porch line.

  Not until he was safely inside his own place, listening to the water hiss as it boiled for a cup of herb tea, did he gradually realize how silly he was being. After all, he reminded himself curtly, it’s not as if this were the Bates Motel or anything. It’s only a sick old woman next door who likes her privacy.

  Nothing to worry about.

  The agent was right about repairs, though, as Nick quickly discovered. He only had to phone and explain the problem and her raspy voice would answer “yes” or “no, not this month.” Once he tried to go over and talk to her about something—an odd and nerve-wracking gurgle-swish-gurgle occasionally erupting from the bathroom drains—but she wouldn’t answer the bell. Only at six p.m. on the first day of the month. Otherwise, telephone only.

  Each month, when Nick rang the bell, her hand would slither out, grab the envelope, and disappear inside. A few times he glimpsed an eye, a nose, once a whiff of white hair, but never anything more. The experience—repeated month after month—became increasingly unsettling. After a while, it seemed to Nick as if the house breathed a dank sense, not quite an odor, more a feeling than anything else.

  There was, however, definitely no lingering scent of Miss Emily’s desiccated rose. For that at least he was thankful.

  Still, it was odd never to see her. Or rather, never to see her clearly. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of her after dark, muffled in dark material that seemed more impenetrable bulk and blackness than clothing. Sitting at his desk by the open bedroom window, struggling through yet another set of stereotypic freshman-comp answers to such earth-shattering topics as ‘Discuss the United Nations” or “Discuss the role of television in shaping American society” (assigned by the departments, not the instructors...certainly not by lowly part-timers), he would hear a muffled click as the door closed, then the light scuff of feet shuffling across the porch. He would see nothing until she was well onto the lawn. Then there would be nothing but an outline against the dim glow of antique street lights perched on concrete pillars like incandescent cormorants peering into paradise. Even then she was only an amorphous form, not quite human, a lump of darkness lumbering down the street.

  Thirty minutes or so later she would return—her lumpishness altered not the least by her now facing in Nick’s general direction. Against the streetlights at the intersection a couple of blocks away,
she was still nothing more than silhouette. With another shuffle across the porch, she would disappear into her house.

  Sometime during the third month of this, she ceased to be Miss Emilia Greer to Nick. She became simply The Greer.

  Greensward was, as Nick quickly discovered, a sleepy street, inhabited primarily by retirees waiting (with varying degrees of impatience, it seemed to him) for death. Still, he would occasionally see someone walking an asthmatic dog, clipping a forlorn hedge, dragging a half-filled plastic garbage can down to the front sidewalk in anticipation of the Sanitation Department’s weekly visit. Subtle though they were, there were signs of life around him. Everywhere, that is, except at the house next door. The only signs of life from The Greer’s place, other than her phantom appearances, were the sounds and the lights.

  The sounds came late at night, very late, after everyone else on Greensward Lane had doused their lights and gone to sleep. The first time, Nick was asleep, too. It was on a scorching night in late September, when he had his windows open to catch the few remnant snatches of breeze that had started earlier, fresher, at the beaches northward in Oxnard and Port Hueneme and somehow managed to make their way through low passes in the Coastal Range and into the valleys beyond. He struggled out of an uneasy sleep punctured with dreams that fled with waking, leaving only a bitter memory. His sheets were drenched with sweat and stuck like hot glue to his chest and stomach and thighs and feet. There was a moment of searing panic, of heart thumping and chest heaving. Then he heard the sound, really heard it, and knew with a rush of relief and gratitude that he was awake.

  That first time, he couldn’t place the sound. It was just an irritating screeee, back and forth, that rubbed against his ears like a child’s fingernail against a classroom chalkboard. He sat up, hunched over almost protectively, and closed his eyes, concentrating on the sound and struggling to match it with an image, something visual to explain it away and let him get back to sleep. Finally he remembered the old swing half-hidden on the far end of The Greer’s porch. He lay back on his bed, imagining her bulky form moving back and forth, back and forth, her weight forcing an eerie squeal from the rusting chain where it hung from a splintered beam. The image caught him and held him until, without knowing it, he slipped into sleep.

  One night, perhaps a month later, he again woke fevered and panting, his skin sticky with sweat and his body exuding the thick stench of fear. He lay on his bed, forcing himself into an unnatural calm, and heard the sound. He sat up and, without turning on the light, tiptoed over to the window—tiptoed, in his own bedroom!—but he couldn’t see anything. It was too dark. He slipped through the house, banging his toe on a kitchen chair and cursing softly, as if afraid of waking an invalid aunt…or something worse. He stepped outside into the back yard. Remembering it later, it seemed to him as if he must have been in a trance; he didn’t notice anything, not even the coolness of damp grass against his bare feet assuaging the pain in his toe, or the cool night air brushing against his body—naked, the way he always slept now that he was safely away from Terri and Billy.

  He followed the sound as far as the hedge between the properties. Squinting just right, he could see a dim shape swinging back and forth on the porch.

  Screeee. Screeee. Screeee.

  He watched it slip back and forth, back and forth, hyopnotically precise, until his head began swinging slowly in rhythm with the shadowy movement.

  Screeee. Screeee. Screeeeee.

  He watched and listened for what seemed hours but might have only been minutes. It was long enough to chill, at any rate. He shivered, a long tremulous quiver that started deep inside and rode his spine upward, down, out. Suddenly he became aware that he was standing buck-naked in his back yard, barely screened by a dense pyracantha hedge, playing peeping-tom on an old woman swinging on her porch.

  Only the porch was empty and the sound had stopped.

  A car turned the corner. Its headlights flickered over the hedge, bright enough to be a spotlight. He broke and ran like a frightened stag into the house, slamming the back door and leaning against it, breathing hard, the long muscles along his thighs quivering and hot.

  Cops! For an insane instant he expected the police to come pounding against the door to arrest him for indecent exposure.

  When they didn’t, he somehow made it back to his bed without knocking over every lamp, table, and bookcase in the house. The room was insufferably hot, even hotter than earlier, and the sheets were damp and clammy. They smelled stale and acrid.

  Even so, he slammed the window down and pulled on pajamas and cinched a full-length robe (a not-so-subtle Christmas gift from his mother three years before) around his waist and lay on top of his sheets, panting and sweating for hours before finally drifting into unpleasant, unhappy dreams.

  The next time he heard the sound, the waking was less traumatic, the panic diminished. It was only a crippled old woman, after all, hoping for a cooling breeze on a hot night, sitting alone on an old porch swing.

  The lights were more difficult to explain. He only saw them occasionally—maybe a dozen times in three years. The first time was late, about two a.m. He didn’t stay out that late as a rule, but that day a friend from grad school had landed a job—a real job...full-time, tenure-track, benefits, and everything—and treated Nick to a blow-out dinner at the fanciest restaurant they could think of, that place along Balboa harbor made up to look like an old-time paddle-wheeler. The prices were outrageous but the food was almost worth it. In fact, watching Perry sitting there, white plastic bib hanging ridiculously around his neck, as he struggled with the assortment of forks, pliers, and corkscrews the waitress gave him to attack his bouillabaisse came close to being worth the price. Perry was more the TV-dinner type—with or without a TV.

  What with drinks and everything, and then talking, and finally the interminable drive back to Tamarind Valley, it was at least two when Perry’s antiquated Volkswagen rolled up in front of Nick’s place. They talked a while longer, Nick got out, and they talked through the open window a few moments more before Nick finally waved goodbye and the VW stuttered down the deserted street, taillights bobbing at every rut and crack like apples in a barrel at a kid’s Halloween party.

  Nick watched until the car turned the corner and disappeared. He listened to the half-silence of early morning. There were stars shining, a rarity for Southern California, and he could see some favorite constellations from when he was a kid—Virgo, the Big Dipper, bits and pieces of the Little Dipper if you squinted just right. He scanned the sky for Orion but couldn’t find it. Beyond that, he discovered that somewhere over the intervening years, he’d forgotten the names of most of the other stars and constellations. The discovery seemed unutterably sad.

  Finally, he turned and walked toward the house but stopped halfway across the lawn. There was a movement, a ghostly movement more sliver or blue than white, coming from behind The Greer’s.

  He looked again. The windows facing his house were dead black, as if the faded and streaked muslin-colored draperies he could see from the outside were merely linings for heavier material that swallowed all light from inside. It struck him as odd right then, but he had never actually seen a light in her house at night.

  Now there was something there, a moonlight shimmer on the leaves along the far side of the house. He almost went inside his place, then abruptly turned around and crossed the lawn to the sidewalk. He slipped through the darkness, trying for nonchalance in case anyone drove by, but in a few seconds he was far enough in front of her house to see the light flickering through a narrow window near the back. All of the other windows were dead black.

  He stood there, trying to identify the light. When he finally did so, he had to go back years to when he was a kid in Montana.

  The Wheelers lived in a small town. It was fair-sized, compared to others in the state back then, but after living in LA, Nick realized that Montana-big was generally big fish in a small—no, make that miniscule—pond. The town was cultur
ally backwards as well. One lonely McDonald’s®, no Long John Silver’s™ Fish and Chips, no Taco Bell®, no four-in-one drive-in theaters (or twelve-screen walk-ins, for that matter). No nothing, it seemed in retrospect.

  And only one channel on the television.

  More than a decade later, that single fact seemed incredible to Nick as he consciously framed the thought. After all, right that minute he could go home, swivel his chair away from his desk and turn on his portable Sony to pull in thirteen VHF channels and maybe fifteen more on UHF—plus Showtime®, HBO®, Playboy®, sports channels, news channels, rock-video channels, even a Japanese soap opera if he wanted. If The Greer ever let him spring for full cable, he could multiply that number by about twenty. Having only one channel must have meant that he had led an almost criminally deprived childhood or something without even knowing it.

  Even worse, no one he knew had a color set. Nick didn’t even hear about color sets until he was almost ten or see one for a lot more years. Everyone he knew watched the single offering on black-and-white, nineteen-inch wood-grain cabinet models.

  He still remembered walking down the streets in late evening on long summer days, sometimes alone, sometimes with the guys, looking for fun—or maybe a touch of very minor-league trouble. The street would be pretty much deserted, with the little kids inside and the bigger ones heading out in a variety of jalopies and hot-rods for the Rimrocks and a hot night playing at sex. Usually mosquitoes buzzed through the night, but he and his little gang learned to ignore the insects. And all he could see of human life would be weird silver-blue lights from televisions showing black-and-white movies in dark living rooms. From every house, that ghostly flicker, spilling onto lawns and rose bushes and making them look like alien landscapes from another planet. He and his buddies didn’t need books by King or Straub or Campbell or Koontz to fill their worlds with horror. Werewolves and vampires and ghosts slithered through the silvery shadows even as they walked their own haunted streets. The mosquitoes buzzed more loudly.