Static! Read online

  The memory clicked.

  That was what he saw through that tall, narrow window at the back of The Greer’s house.

  The light leaking out of the blackness of that house reminded him of a suppurating wound.

  Distantly, as if an echo’s echo, he heard an electronic buzzing.

  He shivered and ran to his back door and hurried inside, switching on every light in every room as he went until he reached his bedroom. He never could remember going to sleep but he woke up at 10:30 the next morning, dressed to his shoes, sprawled on a rumpled corduroy bedspread, threadbare and faded, that dated back beyond his undergraduate days. His head pounded and his back felt stiff. Every light in the house was on. For an instant, he couldn’t remember why, and when he finally did remember he felt so stupid that he had to laugh. Here he was, grown and a man, and afraid of the glow from a television screen!

  After that he only saw the light occasionally. Each time it was late at night, after the normal life on Greensward Lane had gone to sleep. He never mentioned it to anyone and, after a time, he simply ignored it.

  His years as tenant to The Greer, though largely uneventful, were thus stranger than they might otherwise have been, what with the lights and the sounds and his irrational reactions to them. Add to that the fact that Nick never once saw her, not fully, not even when they found her dead on the back porch of her house, and anyone could understand why Nick hated even thinking of her and felt unduly nervous about meeting his new landlord: her great-nephew, a fellow with the unlikely name of Payne Gunnison. Nick Wheeler didn’t want to meet him at all, not this soon after The Greer’s death.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Yeah, The Greer died.

  Her death was as odd as everything else about the old woman.

  For the last month or so, maybe twice a week a delivery boy wearing a uniform shirt from the pharmacy a mile away would bicycle up to her front walk and hop off, letting the bike wobble on under its own power until it thudded down on the straggly grass, front wheel still slowly turning, looking for all the world like something dying…or just dead. He would take the porch steps two at a time and hammer on her door. Nick could hear him clear across the lawn, so he could imagine what it must have sounded like to her. Apparently she never complained because the kid did the same thing each time and Nick never heard her yell at him. There would be the hammering, then silence, then the delivery boy clumping down the stairs to retrieve his bike and pedal off. The last few times he took the steps with less energy than usual but rode off faster. The kid never looked back.

  On the last day, a thunderstorm built up in the northwest late in the afternoon, something unusual for Tamarind Valley in the early summer. The air was stifling, heavy; it had topped ninety degrees by eight a.m. and for most of the day it seemed like nothing was moving—no clouds, no insects, no birds, no breath of wind. Nick was working his way through a particularly wearisome stack of freshman papers, typing intermittently on a short story when the reading got too tedious to bear. In the background, his little portable Sony® TV chattered quietly—a creature-feature on Channel 9, full of moans and groans and creaking doors punctuated by shrieks. Just the right thing for the batch of papers that he really had to finish by the next day.

  The temperature climbed steadily. The portable fan he had picked up on sale at Builder’s Best® for $19.95 stirred barely more than a breath; when it did the hot air was almost worse than no circulation at all. He was stripped to his shorts, and already even they were uncomfortably clammy and sweat-damp around the elastic. His back stuck to the imitation leather of the chair. He thought about going to the bathroom for a towel to throw over the chair but the imagined benefits didn’t seem worth the exertion required. Sweat beaded on his lips and forehead and neck; the saltiness stung where he had nicked himself shaving that morning. He could smell himself and the idea of a shower—or better yet a long, cool bath with a favorite book propped on the cracked porcelain tub—sounded better and better.

  “One more paper,” he promised himself, muttering into the silence. “Just one more.”

  At that moment, as suddenly as if the house had heard his resolve and decided to thwart him, the lights blinked out. The fan blades stuttered to a standstill. With a final shriek that tapered into static, then silence, the TV died.

  Nick looked up. “What the hell!”

  In the first moments of a power failure, things don’t always register right. Whenever it happened to Nick, he habitually toggled the nearest light switch even though it would be obvious from the darkness everywhere in the house around him that it wasn’t a problem with just one fixture.

  This time was no exception. He jumped up, almost upsetting his chair, and slapped the light switch by the door. Up. Down. Up. Down. Pause.

  Up-Down. Up-Down. Pause again.

  UpDownUpDownUpDown.

  Nothing.

  He glanced out the window again to see if anyone else was having problems. It was difficult to tell in the daylight, but old habits die hard and Nick always checked at night when the power went off. His eyes weren’t adjusted to the brightness outside; he blinked a couple of times but even so he thought he saw sparks and blue fingers of current dancing on the leads to The Greer’s.

  He crossed the room and leaned across the cluttered desk for a closer look.

  Nothing.

  He rubbed his eyes. They burned when the sweat touched them. The sticky heat was worse without the fan.

  The sparks were just imagination, he finally decided. Imagination and fatigue—or boredom.

  He heard a jingling whir and looked out again in time to see the delivery boy plow across the lawn, a packet tucked in the back pocket of his worn jeans so the white end of the pharmacy envelope stuck out like a surrender flag. The kid jumped onto the porch and began pounding on and off for three or four minutes. Nick was just about to yell out the window for him to be quiet when the boy stopped, jumped down the steps, and jogged to the back, cutting between Nick’s place and The Greer’s. Nick could see that the kid’s forehead glistened with sweat. Dark patches crept from under his arms, along the back of his neck, and around his waist. He disappeared around the back corner.

  Seconds later, before Nick had time to settle into his chair, the kid was back, running along the side of the house. He grabbed his bike and peddled up the road like the Creature from the Black Lagoon was just around the corner. Still wearing only his shorts, Nick ran through the house and onto his front porch, staying hidden in the deep shadow of the porch. The boy raced past two or three houses, stopped, turned, and pedaled slowly toward The Greer’s. He stopped one house beyond hers—the place belonged to the Harrisons, an elderly couple who smiled and nodded to Nick whenever they saw him. The boy raced up to their door. He knocked, the door opened, and after a second he disappeared inside.

  Everything’s all right, Nick thought. The kid just forgot a delivery for the Harrisons.

  But there had only been one packet, and when the kid entered the Harrisons’ house, he wasn’t carrying anything in his hands.

  Nick shrugged and went inside. The fan was running again. The TV cut to an iced-tea commercial with some has-been football player falling backwards into a swimming pool. At least he would be cool. Nick’s mind kept trying to argue that the boy had just forgotten that second delivery, that he had a message from the pharmacist for the Harrisons that he had remembered at the last second. Something like that.

  But later, remembering that afternoon—the heat, the almost tangible sense of oppression, the chill that invaded his spine as he sat down and glimpsed the corner of The Greer’s house and the electrical wires shimmering in the heat-waves—Nick realized that even then, even before he saw the white-shrouded corpse, something deep inside was telling him that he didn’t want to go over to that house…ever.

  He wasn’t surprised when the siren wound up Greensward and died to a whine outside his window. He pulled on a pair of ragged cut-offs and went outside. Two men in blue shirts jumped out
of a paramedic truck, grabbed bags and satchels, and ran up the walk. By the time they disappeared around the back corner, a police car had arrived as well, its bubble-gum lights flashing, siren wailing. Two or three minutes later, the ambulance pulled up.

  Nick waited, watching the house, watching the knots of curious people that clustered here and there along the block. Not a soul ventured closer than the edge of The Greer’s property. Most of the people were old and acted as if they were slightly more than curious about seeing death close up. Dress rehearsal for the real thing, Nick thought. Couples leaned against each other. One old woman, so thin that even from his porch Nick could see blue veins on her hands and arms, plucked nervously at a seam on her husband’s shirt as if to ward off this implicit threat of his (or her) approaching mortality. The Harrisons stood near their front door next to the delivery boy. Nick could see that the kid was white and shaken. Cops were talking to the three of them.

  Mr. Harrison looked up and, across the expanse of The Greer’s lawn, caught Nick’s eye. For a moment, Nick intuited panic…relief…fear—a complex of emotions captured in those eyes. The Harrisons walked every night in good weather, out their door, then right, up the sidewalk and away from The Greer’s. They returned the same way: He never saw them walk in front of her house.

  He started off the porch, intending to cross The Greer’s lawn and speak to them. Mr. Harrison whispered something to his wife. She looked up, shot a single glance at Nick, and shook her head violently, then grabbed Mr. Harrison’s arm. They said something quick to the cop and hurried inside the shadows of their own home.

  Later, Nick grew increasingly convinced that he should have kept going and talked with them. He might have saved their lives.

  Or maybe lost his own.

  But he didn’t go. Instead he retreated into the shade, sweating in the growing heat but unable to go inside...yet.

  Fifteen minutes passed before the stretcher reappeared. He expected the paramedics to come through the front door of the house but they didn’t. It was as if no one really wanted to stay inside. Instead, the two paramedics pulled the clumsy apparatus over the uneven grass from the back yard around the corner of the house and across the lawn toward the waiting ambulance. They moved slowly, as if speed wasn’t a priority any more. The body was covered with a sheet and tied down in three places with black webbing.

  The Greer was dead.

  Nick had never once seen her.

  Several days later, he received formal notice from Mr. Cleveland Brown that her heir, one Payne Gunnison, would take possession of the house at 1477 Greensward Lane. All agreements between Mr. Wheeler and the late Emilia Greer would be honored by Mr. Gunnison until the expiration of the lease, at which time they would be re-negotiated as necessary. Rent was due, as always, on the first of the month.

  Nick didn’t want to meet Payne Gunnison. If he was anything like The Greer, life on Greensward Lane might remain unsettling.

  Or—given the right conjunction of nightmares—he could be worse.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In spite of a perhaps understandable hesitation about even meeting the new landlord, Nick abruptly did much more than just that. In fact, even though the other man didn’t know it, Nick actually saw Payne Gunnison the night he arrived in Tamarind Valley.

  Nick was reading late, well past midnight. This time it was for pleasure rather than as part of an assignment. He was immersed in about the tenth reading of a Stephen King novel, The Shining—the classic about the haunted hotel up in the Rockies. He was just at the place where the topiary animals begin to move around and, taking his cue from the novel, had almost decided to wander into the kitchen for a cold drink. He leaned back in his chair, stretched, laid his hands on the armrest, and thought seriously about pushing himself up. But instead of getting up, he simply stared. Out the window. At nothing. He sat for five minutes, staring into nothingness and thinking thoughts that never quite found form enough to be remembered. It was just one of those absent lapses that happen to everyone at odd times. They happened to Nick more often than to most, maybe, and he had learned long before not to fight against them. Some of his best ideas came in intuitive flashes during such moments—images and ideas, sometimes whole poems and lines for stories.

  When he came back to himself, he leaned forward again to pick up the book, having finally decided against the drink as too much trouble.

  That was when he heard the car stop out front.

  From the study window, he could barely see the pale yellow trapezoid of light that marked the top of a taxi. Valley Cab, probably, he thought, since that was the only company that regularly worked Tamarind Valley. The wan glow filtered through the leaves of a scraggly hibiscus, fragmenting itself into shards that were as much shadow as light.

  A dusky cab, outlined by dim porch lights across the street, had stopped at the end of the sidewalk leading like a strip of molten lead beneath a flat-metal moon from The Greer’s porch to Greensward. As Nick watched, a man got out, pulled a suitcase out of the back seat, leaned into the window (presumably to pay the cabby), and turned toward the walk.

  Payne Gunnison had arrived.

  For days, Nick had been trying to visualize him. The best he could come up with was a nightmarishly masculine version of The Greer, with fleshier claws and a bulkier shadow but still hiding like a festering malignancy behind a barely opened door. An unconscious image of some of Faulkner’s less savory characters probably had filtered into the composite as well. At any rate, Payne Gunnison was not someone Nick Wheeler believed he would be thrilled at the prospect of meeting...and particularly not this close to the witching hour.

  Before Gunnison made it to the sidewalk, Nick’s hand flicked to the base of his flexible-neck, bullet-shaded study lamp and twisted. His room was suddenly dark—darker than the moonlit night outside. He sat at the desk without moving.

  The cab left before Gunnison was halfway to The Greer’s front porch. The man might own the house now…and Nick’s, but as far as Nick was concerned both were still The Greer’s. The name lay like a shadow over both places in Nick’s mind. He wasn’t sure he would ever change the way he thought about them.

  But The Greer was dead!

  Nick couldn’t make out any details until Gunnison crossed in front of the window, and then Nick only glimpsed an outline—someone, a man, carrying a suitcase. Tall, possibly quite thin. Beyond that, nothing.

  He waited a little longer. The figure disappeared into the shadows that obscured the porch. Distantly, Nick heard the front door creak and saw a sliver of light—healthy, normal yellow incandescence from a light bulb—before the door creaked shut and darkness swallowed the house. No light showed through the heavily curtained windows facing his place. Nick hadn’t expected it to. In his three years living next door, none ever had.

  He waited ten minutes longer before he turned the light back on and hunched over the King novel. He read the next chapter. When he turned the last page, he looked up. Someone was watching him. He felt it, knew it—but all he could see through the window was the dark heap of shadows that was The Greer’s house.

  Still no light. Nothing but darkness, foreboding, imposing, looming against the distant, star-specked sky. The moon had dropped behind the trees.

  He hated that house, he realized suddenly and passionately. Hated it...and feared it. It threatened. It intimidated. It seemed self-satisfied, as if, serpentine, it had just gulped down Payne Gunnison whole and was now sated, bloated, settling back to digest him and wait patiently for the next meal.

  And that meal—baked, barbecued, or fricasseed—would be Nick Wheeler.

  “What am I thinking?” Nick blurted out. He didn’t need an answer. The sounds echoing from the walls of his study reassured him. He shook his head violently, once or twice, as if to clear water clogging his ears after a long summer swim. The feeling disappeared. In its place, he merely felt foolish.

  He glanced at the pages on his desk, grabbed the book, and tossed it open onto the
stack of freshman papers.

  It slid off, taking most of the papers with it and scattering them on the floor. One of the books’ pages ripped loose from its binding, the cheap paper rough and ragged along the inside edge. He looked at the mess and shrugged.

  “Tomorrow,” Nick said. Tomorrow he would straighten up the pile, finish reading the papers, maybe finish the King novel again. Maybe finally buy a new copy to replace that one. It was falling apart. And it wasn’t the first book he had literally read to pieces.

  Tomorrow.

  When haunted houses leave their pages and infiltrate real life, he thought, it is definitely time for a reality check, and then for sleep.

  The next day was Friday, usually the one day Nick had no school assignments scheduled, either as student or as teacher. So without even thinking about what he was doing he slept in until well past ten o’clock, batting the alarm off the night stand when it began stuttering a short time after six, and sleeping on until his eyelids slit apart of their own accord. It felt late but he didn’t know how late. The electric clock hummed along the baseboard where it had fallen face away from him. He could smell his own stale breath, the slightly acrid scent of his body after a long, hot night. The air touching his face was already stifling. He felt full and needed to relieve himself. But as soon as he pulled himself out of bed, the first thing he did was to glance across the lawn toward The Greer’s.

  There was no movement, no change, nothing to suggest that the house was now tenanted by anyone—or anything—other than the old woman’s shade. The windows were sealed by the usual layers of faded gray-white material. The door was clamped tightly shut. The porch remained an island of dusty shadow in the bright Tamarind Valley morning.