"Something
interesting?"
"Sort
of interesting, yeah."
"Something
you didn't want to tell me until the papers were signed?"
"Nothing
that would change your mind, Tom. Just a little bit odd." "So?
It's haunted?"
Archer
smiled and leaned over his cup. "Not quite. Though that wouldn't
surprise me. The property has a peculiar history. The lot was
purchased in 1963 and the house was finished the next year. From 1964
through 1981 it was occupied by a guy named Ben Collier—lived
alone, came into town once in a while, no visible means of support
but he paid his bills on time. Friendly when you talked to him, but
not
real
friendly.
Solitary."
"He
sold the house?"
"Nope.
That's the interesting part. He disappeared around 1980 and the
property came up for nonpayment of taxes. Nobody could locate the
gentleman. He had no line of credit, no social security number
anybody could dig up, no registered birth—his car wasn't even
licensed. If he died, he didn't leave a corpse." Archer sipped
his coffee. "Real good coffee here, in my opinion. You know they
grind the beans in back? Their own blend. Colombian, Costa Rican—"
Tom
said, "You're enjoying this story."
"Hell,
yes! Aren't you?"
Tom
discovered that he was, as a matter of fact. His interest had
been piqued. He looked at Archer across the table— frowned and
looked more closely. "Oh, shit, I know who you are! You're the
kid who used to pitch stones at cars down along the coast highway!"
"You
were a grade behind me. Tony Winter's little brother."
"You
cracked a windshield on a guy's Buick. There were editorials in the
paper. Juvenile delinquency on the march."
Archer
grinned. "It was an experiment in ballistics."
"Now
you sell haunted houses to unsuspecting city slickers.
"I
think 'haunted* is kind of melodramatic. But I did hear another odd
story about the house. George Bukowski told me this—George is a
Highway Patrol cop, owns a double-wide mobile home down by the
marina. He said he was up along the Post Road last year, cruising by,
when he saw a light in the house—which he knew was unoccupied
'cause he'd been in on the search for Ben Collier. So he stopped for
a look. Turned out a couple of teenagers had broken a basement
window. They had a storm lantern up in the kitchen and a case of
Kokanee and a ghetto blaster—just having a good old party. He took
them in and confiscated maybe an eighth-ounce of dope from the oldest
boy, Barry Lindell. Sent 'em all home to their parents. Next day
George goes back to the house to check out the damage—the kicker
is, it turns out there wasn't any damage. It was like they'd never
been there. No matches on the floor, no empties, everything
spit-polished."
Tom
said, "The window where they broke in?" "It wasn't
broken anymore." "Bullshit," Tom said.
Archer
held up his hands. "Sure. But George swears on it. Says the
window wasn't even reputtied, he would have recognized that. It
wasn't
fixed
—
it
just
wasn't
broken."
The
waitress delivered the sandwich. Tom picked it up and took a
thoughtful bite. "This is an obsessively
tidy
ghost
we're talking about."
"The
phantom handyman."
"I
can't say I'm frightened."
"I
don't guess you have any reason to be. Still—" "I'll keep
my eyes open."
"And
let me know how it goes," Archer said. "I mean, if that's
okay with you." He slid his business card across the table. "My
home number's on the back."
"You're
that curious?"
Archer
checked out the next table to make sure nobody was listening. "I'm
that fucking bored."
"Yearning
for the old days? A sunny afternoon, a rock in your hand, the smell
of a wild convertible?"
Archer
grinned. The grin said, Hell, yes, I
am
that
kid, and I don't much mind admitting it.
This
man enjoys life, Tom thought.
Heartening
to believe that was still possible.
Before
he drove out to the house Tom stopped at the Harbor Mall to pick up
supplies. At the A&P he assembled a week's worth of staples and a
selection of what Barbara used to call bachelor food: frozen entrees,
potato chips, cans of Coke in plastic saddles. At the Radio Shack he
picked up a plug-in phone, and at Sears he paid $300 for a portable
color TV.
Thus
equipped for elementary survival, he drove to the house up along the
Post Road.
The
sun was setting when he arrived. Did the house look haunted? No, Tom
thought. The house looked
suburban.
Cedar
siding a little faded, the boxy structure a little lost in these
piney woods, but not dangerous. Haunted, if at all, strictly by Mr.
Clean. Or perhaps the Tidy Bowl Man.
The
key turned smoothly in the lock.
Stepping
over the threshold, he had the brief but disquieting sensation
that this was after all somebody else's house . . . that he had
arrived, like Officer Bukowski's juvenile delinquents, without
credentials. Well, to hell with
that.
He
flicked every light switch he could reach until the room was
blisteringly bright. He plugged in the refrigerator—it began to hum
at once—and dropped the Cokes inside. He plugged in the TV set and
tuned the rabbit ears to a Tacoma station, a little fuzzy but
watchable. He cranked the volume up. Noise and light.
He
preheated the ancient white enamel stove, watching the elements for a
time to make sure everything worked. (Everything did.) The black
Bakelite knobs were as slick as ebony; his own fingerprints seemed
like an insult to their polished surface. He slipped a TV dinner into
the oven and closed the door. Welcome home.
A
new life,
he
thought.
That
was why he had come here—or at least that was what he'd told his
friends. Looking around this clean, illuminated space, it was
possible—almost possible—to believe that.
He
took the TV dinner into the living room and poked at the tepid fried
chicken with a plastic fork while MacNeil (or Lehrer, he had never
quite sorted that out) conducted a round-table discussion of this
year's China crisis. When he was finished he tidied away the foil
plate into a plastic bag— he wasn't ready to offend the Hygiene
Spirit just yet—and pulled the tab on a Coke. He watched two nature
documentaries and a feature history of Mormonism. Then,
suddenly, it was late, and when he switched off the set he heard
the wind turning the branches of the pines; he was reminded how far
he had come from town and what a large slice of loneliness he might
have bought himself, here.
He
turned up the heat. The weather was still cool, summer still a
ways off. He stepped outside and watched the silhouettes of the tall
pines against the sky. The sky was bright with stars. You have to
come a long way out, Tom thought, to see a sky like this.
Inside,
he locked the door behind him and slid home the security chain.
The
bed in the big bedroom belonged to him now . . .
but
he had never slept in it, and he felt the weight of its strangeness.
The bed was made in the same Danish Modern style as the rest of the
furniture: subdued, almost generic, as if it had been averaged out of
a hundred similar designs; not distinctive but solidly made. He
tested the mattress; the mattress was firm. The sheets smelled
faintly of clean, crisp linen and not at all of dust.
He
thought,
I'm
an intruder here . . .
But
he frowned at himself for the idea. Surely not an intruder, not
after the legal divinations and fiscal blessings of the realty
office. He was that most hallowed institution now, a Homeowner.
Misgivings, at this stage, were strictly beside the point.
He
switched off the bedside lamp and closed his eyes in the foreign
darkness.
He
heard, or thought he heard, a distant humming . . . barely audible
over the whisper of his own breath. The sound of faraway, buried
machinery. Night work at a factory underground. Or, more likely,
the sound of his imagination. When he tried to focus on it it
vanished into the ear's own night noises, tinnitus and the creaking
of small bones. Like every house, Tom thought, this one must move and
sigh with the pulse of its heat and the tension of its beams.
Surrounded
by the dark and the buzzing of his own thoughts, he fell asleep at
last.
The
dream came to him after midnight but well before dawn —it was three
a.m
.
when he woke and checked his watch.
The
dream began conventionally. He was arguing with Barbara, or bearing
the brunt of one of her arguments. She had accused him of complicity
in some sweeping, global disaster: the warming of the earth,
ocean pollution, nuclear war. He protested his innocence (at least,
his ignorance); but her small face, snub-nosed, lips grimly
compressed, radiated a disbelief so intense that he could smell the
rising odor of his own guilt.
But
this was only one more variation of what had become the standard
Barbara dream. On another night it might have ended there. He would
have come awake drenched in the effluvia of his own doubt; would have
rinsed his face with cold tap water and staggered back to bed like a
battle-fatigued foot soldier slogging to the trenches.
Tonight,
instead, the dream dissolved into a new scenario. Suddenly he was
alone; he was in a house that was like this house, but bigger,
emptier; he was lying on his back in a room with a single high
window. There was a diffuse moonlight that illuminated only his bed
and left the margins of the room in cavernous darkness.
Hidden
in that darkness, things were moving.
He
couldn't tell what sort of things they were. Their feet ticked like
cat's claws on the hard floor and they seemed to be whispering to one
another in a high, buzzing falsetto—a language he had never heard.
He imagined elves; he imagined immense, articulate rats.
But
the worst thing was their invisibility—compounded by what he
recognized suddenly as his own helplessness. He understood that the
room had no door; that the window was impossibly high; that his arms
and legs were not just stiff but paralyzed.
He
strained forward, peering into the darkness . . .
And
they
opened
their eyes—all at once.
A
hundred eyes all around him.
A
hundred disks of pure, pupil-less, bone-white light.
The
whispering rose in a metallic, clattering crescendo—
And
he awoke.
Woke
alone in this smaller, brighter, but still moonlit and unfamiliar
room. Woke with his heart pounding wildly in his chest.
Woke
with the sound still ringing in his ears: The hiss of their voices.
The clatter of their nails.
Of
course, it was only a dream.
The
morning house was clean, hollow, blank, and prosaic. Tom paced from
bedroom to kitchen listening to the unfamiliar shush of his feet
against the broadloom. He put together breakfast, fried eggs and a
bagel, and stacked the dirty dishes in the sink when he was finished.
Bachelor housekeeping. Maybe the Genius Loci would clean up.
Yesterday's
overcast had spilled away across the mountains. Tom opened the
screen door at the back of the kitchen and stepped out into the yard.
The lawn had been slashed down to stubble but was starting to grow
back, as much weed as grass. No housekeeping elves out here. A stand
of tall pine rose up beyond the margin of the yard, enclosing ferns
and fallen needles in its darkness. An overgrown trail led away from
the corner of the yard and Tom followed it a few paces in, but the
trees closed out the sun and the air was suddenly chill. He listened
a moment to the drip of water somewhere in this spongy wilderness.
Archer had said the forest ran a long way back, that there was a
cedar swamp behind the property. (Archer would know, Tom thought.
Archer the car-stalker, trailblazer, rock-climber, truant . . . these
childhood memories had begun to freshen.) A damp breeze tickled
the pale hair on his arms. A hummingbird darted up, regarded him
querulously, and darted away.