“What did the psychologist say?” he asked.
“Said she’ll outgrow it,” Diane answered.
Steve smiled. “Want to get a second opinion?”
Diane shrugged. “Maybe. Doris Melnick said we should. Or maybe we shouldn’t start building the pool now, is all. Maybe we should wait until she does outgrow it. I mean, Steve, she could walk right out there in the middle of the night and fall into it and we’d never even know until morning.”
“Relax, honey; take it easy. We just have to remember to keep the doors locked, that’s all; she can’t get out then.” He leaned over and nibbled Diane’s ear; her face softened. “Don’t you want a pool?” he crooned.
“Pool, schmool, big deal.” She pushed him back, laughing. “First pool on the block. First family on the block . . .”
“First kiss of the night,” he rumbled, in the same register as the approaching thunder.
They kissed. On the little screen at the foot of the bed, Humphrey Bogart kissed Lauren Bacall. On the dressing table against the wall, two ceramic figurines curtsied and bowed.
“Mommy, I’m scared.” It was Robbie standing at the bedroom door. Diane tried to hide the joint.
Steve smiled at her and sighed. “Ah, the family life.” Then to Robbie, “Okay, come on, partner, let’s chase it away.” He walked over to his son, picked the boy up, and lifted him to his shoulders. “Watch your head.” They marched down the hall.
Steve sat on the bed beside Robbie. The tree scratched at the window.
Carol Anne huddled under her covers across the room. “It’s trying to get in, Daddy,” she whispered.
“Now, that tree does not want to get into this house,” Steve instructed them matter-of-factly. “That tree is very old, and its name is Ebeneezer, and it just so happens that it is guarding your room, so nothing bad can get in—even if there was something bad out there, which there’s not.”
Outside, the wind rose, pulling a trash can lid off somewhere and crashing it down the street. Lightning struck again, revealing the tree once more: its shape seemed almost to have changed, its arms groping toward the house, its main fork a gaping maw. The children jumped—thunder boomed—they jumped again.
“Now then,” Steve went on, in a calm, fatherly voice, “all you have to do is count the seconds between when the lightning hits and when the thunder comes. If you can count to seven, the storm’s a mile away. And if you can count higher, the storm is getting even farther away. So there’s nothing to worry about. Okay?”
“I can count to eleven, Daddy,” Carol Anne volunteered.
“That’s terrific, Sweet Pea. Let’s hear.”
“One, two, three, four . . .”
“No, wait until the lightning hits, Carol Anne.”
The lightning hit.
“One, two, three . . .”
Steve rose quietly, and walked out the room.
“. . . seven, eight, nine . . .”
From far away, the heavens rumbled. The children were quiet. Steve went back to his room.
On the way there, he stopped by Dana’s closed door and put his ear to it. Music. He opened it a crack and peeked in.
“Good night, Dana.”
“Uh, g’night, Dad.”
“Off the phone, Dana.”
“Uh, okay, Dad.”
He closed the door again and went back to his own room, smiling the smile of a satisfied patron.
Robbie stared out into the night. Shadows moved, tried to push the house over. The house creaked under the strain.
Finally, the rain came. It spattered the window at first, then drove down in a flood, churning the air, pelting the glass, distorting everything even more. Robbie was certain of it now: they were under attack.
The night flashed white again, like a missile explosion in deep space, silent, violent. The tree writhed as if in pain. Robbie counted to himself, waiting for the shock wave: “. . . five, six, seven . . .”
The thunder started low, like a growling cur, came closer in waves along the ground, finally reached the house, shook the house, pounded the house. Robbie grabbed his terry-cloth bear, and they held each other tightly. Carol Anne had the covers over her eyes, but kept peeking out, uncertain what to think, taking her cues from her older brother.
Again, the lightning. The tree bent forward now, clenched its broken fists, battered the side of the house. The hollow that formed its mouth was open wide: laughing, screaming.
“. . . two, three . . .”
The thunder came more quickly this time, heavier, more insistent. It seemed to grab the house and shake, and it wouldn’t let go. The tree claws began tapping at the window. The wind keened like a ghoul; rain began to leak under the window. Robbie tried to close his eyes, but he couldn’t look away, couldn’t
not
see, couldn’t . . .
A terrible bolt slammed into the tree—the flash was blinding, the shock wave instantaneous, an overwhelming concussion of sound and light. The tree raised up its arms; the children screamed, jumped out of bed, ran down the hall crying.
Steve and Diane sat up with a start, then smiled compassionately as the young ones burst into the room.
“Okay,” Steve said, holding out his arms, “everybody in bed for a camp-in. Waddaya wanna watch—‘Superman’ or ‘Dallas’?”
Everybody jumped in bed.
“. . . Please join us again at six-thirty for ‘Traffic Watch,’ and until then, have a pleasant Good Morning.”
The flag was replaced by a screen full of white snow, as KTCV went off the air. Outside, the rain continued—steadily, without direction or anger. The wind, too, seemed lower; the lightning was now so far away it barely flickered on the horizon, barely disturbed the static on the set. The thunder was gone altogether.
Four bodies slept soundly in the big California King—Steve, Robbie, Carol Anne, Diane. They looked chalky in the glow of the picture tube, looked like ghosts. In the rest of the house, all was still.
Suddenly Carol Anne opened her eyes. She sat up, crawled to the end of the bed, climbed down to the floor, walked up to the television.
Shadow-images moved in the snow, shaped in the static.
“Hello,” she rasped.
Muffled whispers crept out of the screen. A voice. No, many voices, moving as the shapes moved. Semiforms with semivoices, calling, moving, shifting.
“I can’t hear you,” Carol Anne answered in wonder. She wasn’t afraid, only curious, or just a little amazed. “Are you there?”
The whispers grew. Tiny flashes of light sparked across the screen now, like microscopic photon explosions, crystals of light. Carol Anne reached out her hand.
A hand reached back.
A hand of smoke, formless, without substance, exuded from the television screen toward the little girl. Without form, yet somehow handlike, with fingers that curled upward, then down, momentarily encompassing her head—palpating her, testing, tasting the softness of her hair, her delicate neck.
Then it rose, this handlessness rose above the girl and stretched farther into the room, stretched its pulsing tendrils along an ectoplasmic arm that grew longer every second, remaining attached to the screen—stretched until the hand hovered above the bed, above the peaceful sleepers.
Slowly, deliberately, it lowered itself to the bed, to each figure in turn. First it settled over the boy, pushed a cold finger in the slight depression of his chest, stroked his cheek, muffled his whimpers.
Then Diane. It crawled along her skin, rolled her over, pressed her down, while another finger wrapped around Steve’s leg, squeezed, grew.
Presently it rose again, hung above them in the air once more. Carol Anne watched in fascination. Its fingers never ceased moving, probing. Finally, it reached the wall above the bed and stopped, its greenish, tentacular arm extending the length of the room. It grew brighter, it was engorged with light . . . when all at once it shot out of the set and into the wall with a deafening BAM.
Everyone jumped awake, Robbie immediately crying. The room suddenly began shaking, the window cracked, pictures dropped from the walls, light bulbs exploded. The ceramic figurines flew across the room, shattered against the dresser.
And then, just as suddenly, everything stopped. The room fell into an unnatural hush. Outside, the storm passed away utterly.
For a long moment, no one—nothing—moved.
And then Carol Anne whispered: “They’re here.”
Monday morning, Steve began clearing away the debris from the side of the house—the branch that the lightning had sheared off the oak, parts of torn-up bushes, shingles, soggy papers. It was a mess.
Beyond him in the back, a bulldozer made deep cuts in the earth, sloping at one end, squared-off at the other: groundwork on the swimming pool. Inside, he could hear Diane bustling around the kitchen, clattering dishes, making breakfast. Just another typical insane Monday morning.
Ben Tuthill walked across the lawn from his house in the rear, hands in his pockets. Tuthill was dumb, bald, and puffy. Steve couldn’t stand him; still, he felt obliged at least to run through the neighborly forms. He was always willing to give the asshole one more chance, though he was never quite sure why.
Tuthill left his hands in his pockets as he got closer to Steve—he wasn’t about to dirty his hands helping a jerk like Freeling with any manual labor. He’d mostly just come over to gloat, and make some obscure point. Steve ignored him for a few seconds longer than was polite, to finish clearing some brambles out of the drainpipe, then brushed off his hands and smiled broadly.
“Morning, Tuthill.”
“Looks like a disaster area over here, Freeling.”
“Yeah, I just talked to the governor—he’ll be sending in troops and aid any minute. You suppose we could use your roof for the helicopters?”
“Told you you should have cut this tree down ages ago.”
Steve rubbed his knee, leaned on the porch railing. “This isn’t so bad. It’s the quake damage inside that’ll be hard to clean up.”
“What quake you talkin’ about?”
“You didn’t feel it? Shook us all up last night, about two-thirty. Pictures all over the floor.”
“Didn’t hear about any earthquake on the radio this morning, either. Just this old tree rattlin’ your windows in the storm, most likely. Ought to get rid of this thing; it’s a hazard.” Tuthill smiled and walked back home, hands still in his pockets.
Steve went into the kitchen. Robbie and Carol Anne sat at the table, trying to decide whether to eat, fight, or slip pieces of bacon to E. Buzz under the table. Diane beat eggs in a copper bowl while she talked into the phone cradled on her shoulder. A small black-and-white Sony on the counter blared the “Today Show”. Dana was fixing her hair in the reflection of the microwave window, and eating a Figurine.
“Gotta run,” said Steve. He grabbed a muffin, grabbed a feel, and was out the door before Diane could chastise him.
Robbie jumped up, said, “Gotta run,” and darted for the door, but his mother was faster.
“Finish your milk first,” she ordered. Robbie sat down. Diane spoke back into the phone, “I can’t today. Steve’s taking the wagon, and I can’t sardine sixteen Brownies into a Datsun.”
Dana checked her mouth in the reflection as she spoke. “You could arrange ’em all on a plate and put them in the glove compartment.”
“Human Brownies, wise guy,” Diane bantered across the room. “Okay, gotta go, Sharon, see you at the Antique Guild.” She hung up the phone and poured her scrambled eggs onto the hot skillet.
“Mom, can me and Heather and Serena get an apartment by ourselves?”
“You absolutely may not. I don’t even know why you’d ask such a thing.” Diane lightly salted the cooking eggs, stirred them.
“It’s not that I don’t simply adore it here.” Dana was still speaking to her own spectral image in the microwave window. “It’s just that with these earthquakes earthquakes earthquakes all the time, I can’t get any homework done. I think this place has bad karma.”
“What’s karma?” Robbie piped up.
“Karma is what’s gonna make you come back as a jockstrap after you die, ’cause you’re such a toad now.” Dana finished checking her hair and sat down.
“Dana, I don’t need that kind of talk at breakfast,” Diane said, bringing the eggs over to the table.
“Eeeeew—mangled chicken embryos—probably one of the earthquake victims . . .”
“Dana!”
The dog barked. Carol Anne got up from the table, walked over to the television, turned it to Channel 8. White noise. Dreamily, she sat in front of it, staring at the snow.
“Carol Anne . . .” Diane began, a look of concern on her face.
Dana picked up her school books. “Maybe the fault line runs just under our house. Wouldn’t that be a scream?”
“The ceiling got crumbs all over my bed,” said Robbie.
“Carol Anne,” Diane said again to the girl staring into the set, “do you remember when you said, ‘They’re here,’ last night?”
“Uh huh,” said Carol Anne, without looking up.
“Who did you mean, sweetheart. Who’s here?”
“The TV people,” she answered dreamily, her mouth full of cereal.
“She’s stoned,” grinned Robbie.
“What do you know about it, nitwit?” Dana said with a pained look.
“More’n you. Ask Dad.”
Before Diane could gripe at them to behave, the milk glass crumbled in Robbie’s hand—virtually disintegrated into a hundred pieces, expelling the milk forcefully all over the table. She started toward the boy, but suddenly out of the corner of her eye, thought she saw a spoon in the dish rack bend. She gasped, dropped her towel. The milk spilled over Dana’s pants.
“Hey!” she yelled.
Robbie threw up his hands. “It’s not my mess.”
Dana jumped up from the table. “Thanks a lot, jerko—I’ve got class in twenty minutes.”
“Mom!” yelled Robbie.
“Give me that glass before you cut yourself.”
Robbie handed Diane the broken glass, then seized the opportunity. “Late for school, Mom, gotta run.” He charged out the door and slammed it behind him.
Leaving Diane alone with Carol Anne, who was busy fine-tuning the snow on the screen, and Dana, who ran upstairs to change pants.
“Sweetheart,” Diane proded Carol Anne, “what did you mean last night when you said, ‘They’re here’?”
“The TV people.” She continued gazing into the static.