"It's
not an investment, Tony. It's my house. It's where I five."
Tony
gave him a pitying look. "Come on in," Tom said.
He
showed his brother around. Tony poked into cupboards, dug a
fingernail into the window casements, stood up on tiptoe to peer into
the fuse box. When they arrived back at the living room Tom poured
his brother a Coke. Tony acknowledged with a look that this was good,
that there was no liquor handy. "Fairly sound building for its
age," he admitted. "Christ knows it's clean."
"Self-cleaning,"
Tom said.
"What?"
"No—nothing."
"You
planning to have us out for dinner one of these days?" "Soon
as I get set up. You and Loreen and the whole tribe." "Good
. . . that's good."
Tony
finished his Coke and moved toward the door. This is as hard for him,
Tom recognized, as it is for me. "Well," Tony said. "Good
luck, little brother. What can I say?"
"You've
said it. Thanks, Tony."
They
embraced awkwardly. "I'll look for you at the lot," Tony
said, and turned away into the cool night air.
Tom
listened to the van as it thrummed and faded down the road.
He
went back into the house, alone. The silence seemed faintly alive.
"Hello,
ghosts," Tom said. "Bet you didn't do the dishes after
all." But the thing was, they had.
It
wasn't long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost
exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to
you?
The
cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you're
sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with
the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must
sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn't gone
just a little bit wrong?
The
question wasn't academic. As far as he could figure, there were only
two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he
wasn't willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in
this house.
Something
scary. Something strange.
He
shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up
meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter,
garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope
for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done
the dishes himself the night he went to Tony's: it must have been his
memory playing a trick on him.
These
were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy
his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training
manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet
buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to
"T.O."—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who
could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the
customer to the finance people. ("Which is where the
real
money's
made," the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)
The
lot was a new/used operation down along the flat stretch of
Commercial Road between Belltower and the suburban malls. Tom
sometimes thought of it as a paved farm field where a crop of scrap
metal had sprouted but not ripened—everything was still sleek
and new. The weather turned hot on Wednesday; the days were long, the
customers sparse. Tom drank Cokes from sweating bottles and studied
his system manual in the sales lounge. Most of the salesmen took
breaks at a bar called Healy's up the road, but they were a fairly
hard-drinking crowd and Tom wasn't comfortable with that yet.
Lunchtimes, he scuffed across the blistering asphalt to a little
steak and burger restaurant called The Paradise. He was
conserving his money. He might make a respectable income on
commissions in an average month, Klein assured him—assuming he
started selling soon. But it was a grindingly slow month. Evenings he
drove inland through the dense, ancient pine forest and thought about
the mystery of the house. Or tried not to.
Two
possibilities,
his
mind kept whispering.
You're
insane.
Or
you're not alone here.
Thursday
night, he put three greasy china plates on the counter next to the
stainless steel sink and went to bed.
In
the morning the dishes were precisely where he had left them—as
smooth and clean as optical lenses.
Friday
night, he dirtied and abandoned the same three plates. Then he moved
into the living room, tuned in the eleven o'clock news and installed
himself on the sofa. He left the lights on in both rooms. If he moved
his head a few degrees to the right he had a good view of the kitchen
counter. Any motion would register in his peripheral vision.
This
was scientific, Tom reassured himself. An experiment.
He
was pleased with himself for approaching the problem objectively. In
a way, it was almost exciting—staying up late waiting for something
impossible to happen. He propped his feet on the coffee table and
sprang the tab on a soda can.
Half
an hour later he was less enthusiastic. He'd been keeping early
hours; it was hard not to nod off during commercial breaks. He
dozed a moment, sat upright and shot a glance into the kitchen.
Nothing had changed.
(Well,
what had he expected? Gnomes in Robin Hood hats humming "Whistle
While You Work"? Or maybe—some perverse fraction of his
mind insisted—creatures like rats. With clackety claws and saucer
eyes.)
The
"Tonight" show was less than engaging, but he wasn't stuck
with Carson: the local cable company had hooked him up last week. He
abused the remote control until it yielded an antique science fiction
film:
Them,
featuring
James Whitmore and giant ants in the Mojave. In the movies radiation
produced big bugs; in the neighborhood of failed fission
reactors it mainly caused cancer and leukemia—the difference,
Barbara had once observed, between Art and Life. He was nodding
off again by the time the ants took refuge in the storm drains of Los
Angeles. He stood up, walked to the kitchen— where nothing had
changed—and fixed himself a cup of coffee. Now, mysteriously,
it
felt
late:
no traffic down the Post Road, a full moon hanging over the back
yard. He carried his coffee into the living room. It occurred to him
that this was a fairly spooky activity he had selected here: making
odds on his own sanity, sometime after midnight. He had done things
like this—well, things this
reminded
him
of—when he was twelve years old, sleeping in the back yard with a
flashlight or staying up with the monster flicks all by himself.
Except that by now he would have given up and found some reassuring
place to spend the night.
Here,
there was only the house. Probably safe. Hardly reassuring.
He
found an all-night Seattle station showing sitcom reruns. He
propped himself up on the sofa, drained the coffee, and hoped the
caffeine would help keep him awake. It did, or at least it put him on
edge. Edgy, he remembered what he had come to think of as his
father's credo: The world is a cold, thoughtless place and it has no
special love for human beings. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he
should go to bed, let the elves wash up, wake up bright and early and
put the house back on the market. No law required him to become
the Jacques Cousteau of the supernatural. That wasn't what he'd
signed up for.
But
maybe there was nothing supernatural about it. Something odd but
entirely explainable might be at work. Some kind of bacteria. Insects
(nonmutated). Anything. If he had to bet, that's where he'd put his
money.
It
was just that he wanted to know—really
know.
He
stretched out on the sofa. He meant to rest his head against the
padded arm. He had no intention of going to sleep.
He
closed his eyes and began to dream.
This
time, the dream came without preamble.
In
the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and
raised the sash.
The
moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In
the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was
the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar
fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a
curious sinewy motion— but there
was
no
wind; and Tom understood that it wasn't the grass moving, it was
something
in
the
grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a
snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a
startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn't look away
or leave the window . . . somehow, that choice had been taken from
him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and
each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned
simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they
pronounced his name
—
Tom
Winter
—
somehow
inside
his head,
a
voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.
The
TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said
3:45.
In
the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.
He
slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the
morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back
of his business card. "You wanted me to get in touch if I
noticed anything strange."
"That's
right ...
is
it getting weird out there?"
"Just
a little weird. You could say that."
"Well,
you called at the right time. I'm on vacation. The beeper gets
switched off at noon. I was planning to drive up into the Cascades,
but I can put it off a little while. How about if I drop by after
lunch?"
"Good,"
Tom said, but he was troubled by the note of happy anticipation in
Archer's voice.
If
you talk about this,
he
thought,
you're
opening one more door that maybe ought to stay closed—taking one
step closer to ratifying your own insanity.
But
was silence any better? There were times (last night, for instance)
when he felt himself stewing in the sour juice of his own isolation.
No: he needed to talk about this, and he needed to talk about it to
somebody who wasn't family— obviously not Tony or Loreen. Archer
would do.
Dreams
aside, nothing threatening had happened. Some inexpensive dinnerware
had been surreptitiously cleaned: not quite
Ghostbusters
material.
But it was the dream that stayed in his mind.
He
told Archer he'd expect him soon and replaced the phone in its
cradle. The silence of the morning house rang out around him. He
walked to the kitchen door, opened it and took a tentative step
outside.
The
air was bracing; the sky was bright.
Tom
had brought home a power mower from Sears on Wednesday but he hadn't
used it yet; the grass was ankle high. He was briefly afraid to put
his foot down off the back step—a vagrant image of metallic insects
with brightly focused eyes ran through his mind. (They might be
there still. They might
bite.)
He
took a breath and stepped down.
His
ankles itched with anticipation . . . but there was nothing sinister
among these weeds, only a few ants and aphids.
He
walked to the northern quadrant of the yard where the dream-insects
had moved between the house and the woods.
He
understood that by looking for their trail he was violating the
commonsense assumption that dreams are necessarily separate from the
daylight world. But he was past fighting the impulse. Yet another
prop kicked from under the edifice of his sanity. (Tom had begun to
envision his sanity as one of those southern California hillside
houses erected on stilts— the ones that wash into the ocean in a
heavy rain.) He examined the deep, seeded grass where the
insects had seemed to be, but there was nothing unusual among the
dewy grass blades and feathered dandelion heads.