19

JENNY'S HOUSE

Jenny parked the Toyota behind Travis's Chevy and killed the lights.

"Well?" Travis said.

Jenny said, "Would you like to come in?"

"Well." Travis acted as if he had to think about it. "Yes, I'd love to."

"Give me a minute to go in and clear a path, okay?"

"No problem, I need to check on something in my car."

"Thanks." Jenny smiled with relief.

They got out of the car. Jenny went into the house. Travis leaned against the door of the Chevy and waited for her to get inside. Then he threw open the car door and peeked inside.

Catch was sitting on the passenger side, his face stuck in a comic book. He looked up at Travis and grinned.

"Oh, you're back."

"Did you play the radio?"

"No way."

"Good. It's wired into the battery directly; it'll drain the current."

"Didn't touch it."

Travis glanced at the suitcase on the backseat. "Keep an eye on that."

"You got it."

Travis didn't move.

"Is there something wrong?"

"Well, you're being awfully agreeable."

"I told you, I'm just glad to see you having a good time."

"You may have to stay the night in the car. You aren't hungry, are you?"

"Get a grip, Travis. I just ate last night."

Travis nodded. "I'll check on you later, so stay here." Travis closed the car door.

Catch jumped to his feet and watched over the dashboard while Travis went into the house. Ironically, they were both thinking the same thing: in a little while this will all be over.

Catch coughed and a red spiked heel shot out of his mouth and bounced off the windshield, spattering the glass with hellish spit.

Robert had parked his truck a block away from his old house and walked up, hoping and dreading that he would catch Jenny with another man. As he approached the house, he saw the old Chevy parked in front of her Toyota.

He had run through this scene a hundred times in his mind. Walk out of the dark, catch her with the guy, and shout "Ah ha!" Then things got sketchy.

What was the point? He didn't really want to catch her at anything. He wanted her to come to the door with tears streaming down her cheeks. He wanted her to throw her arms around him and beg him to come home. He wanted to assure her that everything would be fine and forgive her for throwing him out. He had run that scene through his mind a hundred times as well. After they made love for the third time, things got sketchy.

The Chevy was not part of his preconceived scenes. It was like a preview, a teaser. It meant that someone was in the house with Jenny. Someone who, unlike Robert, had been invited. New scenes ran through his mind: knocking on the door, having Jenny answer, looking around her shoulder to see another man sitting on the couch, and being sent away. He couldn't stand that. It was too real.

Maybe it wasn't a guy at all. Maybe it was one of the women from the coven who had stopped over to comfort Jenny in her time of need. Then the dream came back to him. He was tied to a chair in the desert again, watching Jenny make love with another man. The little monster was shoving saltines in his mouth.

Robert realized he had been standing in the middle of the street staring at the house for several minutes, torturing himself. Just be adult about it. Go up and knock on the door. If she is with someone else, just excuse yourself and come back later. He felt an ache rising in his chest at the thought.

No, just walk away. Go back to The Breeze's trailer and call her tomorrow. The thought of another night alone with his heartbreak increased the ache in his chest.

Robert's indecision had always angered Jenny. Now it was paralyzing him. "Just pick a direction and go, Robert," she would say. "It can't be any worse than sitting here pitying yourself."

But it's the only thing I'm good at, he thought.

A truck rounded the corner and started slowly to roll up the street. Robert was galvanized into action. He ran to the Chevy and ducked behind it. I'm hiding in front of my own house. This is silly, he thought. Still, it was as if anyone who passed would know how small and weak he was. He didn't want to be seen.

The truck slowed almost to a stop as it passed the house, then the driver gunned the engine and sped off. Robert stayed in a crouch behind the Chevy for several minutes before he moved.

He had to know.

"Just pick a direction and go." He decided to peek in the windows. There were two windows in the living room, about six feet off the ground. Both were old-style, weighted-sash types. Jenny had planted geraniums in the window boxes outside. If the window boxes were strong enough, he could hoist himself up and peek through the gap in the drawn curtains.

Spying on your own wife was sleazy. It was dirty. It was perverse. He thought about it for a moment, then made his way across the yard to the windows. Sleazy, dirty, and perverse would be improvements over how he felt now.

He grabbed the edge of the window box and tested his weight against it. It held. He pulled himself up, hooked his chin on the window box, and peered through the gap in the curtains.

They were on the couch, facing away from him: Jenny and some man. For a moment he thought Jenny was naked, then he saw the thin straps of her black dress. She never wore that dress anymore. It gave out the wrong kind of message, she used to say, meaning it was too sexy.

He stared at them in fascination, caught by the reality of his fear like a deer caught in car headlights. The man turned to say something to Jenny, and Robert caught his profile. It was the guy from the nightmare, the guy he had seen in the Slug that afternoon.

He couldn't look any longer. He lowered himself to the ground. A knot of sad questions beat at him. Who was this guy? What was so great about this guy? What does he have that I don't? Worst of all, how long has this been going on?

Robert stumbled away from the house toward the street. They were sitting in his house, on his couch  -  the couch he and Jenny had saved up to buy. How could she do that? Didn't everything in the house remind her of their marriage? How could she sit on his couch with some other man? Would they screw in his bed? The ache rose up in his chest at the thought, almost doubling him over.

He thought about trashing the guy's car. It was pretty trashed already, though. Flatten the tires? Break the windshield? Piss in the gas tank? No, then he would have to admit to spying. But he had to do something.

Maybe he could find something in the car that would tell him who this home wrecker was. He peered through the Chevy's windows. Nothing much to see: a few fast-food wrappers, a comic book on the front seat, and a Haliburton suitcase on the backseat. Robert recognized it immediately. He used to carry his four-by-five camera in the same model suitcase. He had sold the camera and given the suitcase to The Breeze for rent.

Was this guy a photographer? One way to find out. He hesitated, his hand on the car door handle. What if the guy came out while Robert was rummaging through the car? What would he do? Fuck it. The guy was rummaging through his life, wasn't he? Robert tried the door. It was unlocked. He threw it open and reached in.

20

EFFROM

He was a soldier. Like all soldiers, in his spare moments he was thinking of home and the girl who waited for him there. He sat on a hill looking out over the rolling English countryside. It was dark, but his eyes had adjusted during his long guard duty. He smoked a cigarette and watched the patterns the full moon made on the hills when the low cloud cover parted.

He was a boy, just seventeen. He was in love with a brown-haired, blue-eyed girl named Amanda. She had down-soft hair on her thighs that tickled his palms when he pushed her skirt up around her hips. He could see the autumn sun on her thighs, even though he was staring over the spring-green hills of England.

The clouds opened and let the moon light up the whole countryside.

The girl pulled his pants down around his knees.

The trenches were only four days away. He took a deep drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the grass. He let the smoke out with a sigh.

The girl kissed him hard and wet and pulled him down on her.

A shadow appeared on the distant hill, black and sharply defined. He watched the shadow undulate across the hills. It can't be, he thought. They never fly under a full moon. But the cloud cover?

He looked in the sky for the airship but could see nothing. It was silent except for the crickets singing sex songs. The countryside was still but for the shadow. He lost the vision of the girl. Everything was the huge, cigar-shaped shadow moving toward him, silent as death.

He knew he should run, sound the alarm, warn his friends, but he just sat, watching. The shadow eclipsed the moonlight and he shivered, the airship was directly over him. He could just hear the engines as it passed. Then he was bathed in moonlight, the shadow behind him. He had survived. The airship had held its bellyful of death. Then he heard the explosions begin behind him. He turned and watched the flashes and fires in the distance, listened to the screams, as his friends at the base woke to find themselves on fire. He moaned and curled into a ball, flinching each time a bomb exploded.

Then he woke up.

There was no justice; Effrom was sure of it. Not an iota, not one scintilla, not a molecule of justice in the world. If there was justice, would he be plagued by nightmares from the war? If there was any justice would he be losing sleep over something that had happened over seventy years ago? No, justice was a myth, and it had died like all myths, strangled by the overwhelming reality of experience.

Effrom was too uncomfortable to mourn the passing of justice. The wife had put the flannel sheets on the bed to keep him cozy and warm in her absence. (They still slept together after all those years; it never occurred to them to do any different.) Now the sheets were heavy and cold with sweat. Effrom's pajamas clung to him like a rain-blown shroud.

After missing his nap, he had gone to bed early to try to recapture his dreams of spandex-clad young women, but his subconscious had conspired with his stomach to send him a nightmare instead. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he could feel his stomach bubbling away like a cannibal's caldron, trying to digest him from the inside out.

To say that Effrom was not a particularly good cook was an understatement akin to saying that genocide is not a particularly effective public relations strategy. He had decided that Tater Tots would provide as good a meal as anything, without challenging his culinary abilities. He read the cooking instructions carefully, then did some simple mathematics to expedite the preparation: twenty minutes at 375 degrees would mean only eleven minutes at 575 degrees. The results of his calculation resembled charcoal briquettes with frozen centers, but because he was in a hurry to get to bed, he drowned the suffering Tots in catsup and ate them anyway. Little did he know that their spirits would return carrying nightmare images of the zeppelin attack. He had never been so frightened, even in the trenches, with bullets flying overhead and mustard gas on the wind. That shadow moving silently across the hills had been the worst.

But now, sitting on the edge of the bed, he felt the same paralyzing fear. Though the dream was fading, instead of the relief of finding himself safe, at home, in bed, he felt he had awakened into something worse than the nightmare. Someone was moving in the house. Someone was thrashing around like a two-year-old in a pan-rattling contest.

Whoever it was, was coming through the living room. The house had a wooden floor and Effrom knew its every squeak and creak. The creaks were moving up the hall. The intruder opened the bathroom door, two doors from Effrom's bedroom.

Effrom remembered the old pistol in his sock drawer. Was there time? Effrom shook off his fear and hobbled to the dresser. His legs were stiff and wobbly and he nearly fell into the front of the dresser.

The floor was creaking outside the guest bedroom. He heard the guest room door open. Hurry!

He opened the dresser drawer and dug around under his socks until he found the pistol. It was a British revolver he had brought home from the war  -  a Webley, chambered for.45 automatic cartridges. He broke the pistol open like a shotgun and looked into the cylinders. Empty. Holding the gun open, he dug under his socks for the bullets. Three cartridges were held in a plate of steel shaped like a half-moon so the pistol's six cylinders could be loaded in two quick motions. The British had developed the system so they could use the same rimless cartridges in their revolvers that the Americans used in their Colt automatics.

Effrom located one of the half-moon clips and dropped it into the pistol. Then he started searching for the sound.

The doorknob of his room started to turn. No time. He flipped the gun upward and it slammed shut, only half loaded. The door slowly started to swing open. Effrom aimed the Webley at the center of the door and pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked, the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He pulled the trigger again and the gun fired. Inside the small bedroom the gun's report sounded like the end of the world. A large, ragged hole appeared in the door. From the hall came the high-pitched scream of a woman. Effrom dropped the gun.

For a moment he stood there, gunfire and the scream echoing in his head. Then he thought of his wife. "Oh my God! Amanda!" He ran forward. "Oh my God, Amanda. Oh my..." He threw the door open, leapt back, and grabbed his chest.

The monster was down on its hands and knees. His arms and head filled the doorway. He was laughing.

"Fooled you, fooled you," the monster chanted.

Effrom backed into the bed and fell. His mouth moved like wind-up chatter dentures, but he made no sound.

"Nice shot, old fella'," the monster said. Effrom could see the squashed remains of the.45 bullet just above the monster's upper lip, stuck like an obscene beauty mark. The monster flipped the bullet off with a single claw. The heavy slug thudded on the carpet.

Effrom has having trouble breathing. His chest was growing tighter with each breath. He slid off the bed to the floor.

"Don't die, old man. I have questions for you. You can't imagine how pissed I'll be if you die now."

Effrom's mind was a white blur. His chest was on fire. He sensed someone talking to him, but he couldn't understand the words. He tried to speak, but no words would come. Finally he found a breath. "I'm sorry, Amanda. I'm sorry," he gasped.

The monster crawled into the room and laid a hand on Effrom's chest. Effrom could feel the hand, hard and scaly, through his pajamas. He gave up.

"No!" the monster shouted. "You will not die!"

Effrom was no longer in the room. He was sitting on a hill in England, watching the shadow of death floating toward him across the fields. This time the zeppelin was coming for him, not the base. He sat on the hill and waited to die. I'm sorry, Amanda.

"No, not tonight."

Who said that? He was alone on the hill. Suddenly he became aware of a searing pain in his chest. The shadow of the airship began to fade, then the whole English countryside dissolved. He could hear himself breathing. He was back in the bedroom.

A warm glow filled his chest. He looked up and saw the monster looming over him. The pain in his chest subsided. He grabbed one of the monster's claws and tried to pry it from his chest, but it remained fast, not biting into the flesh, just laid upon it.

The monster spoke to him: "You were doing so good with the gun and everything. I was thinking, 'This old fuck really has some gumption.' Then you go and start drooling and wheezing and ruining a perfectly good first impression. Where's your self-respect?"

Effrom felt the warmth on his chest spreading to his limbs. His mind wanted to switch off, dive under the covers of unconsciousness and hide until daylight, but something kept bringing him back.

"Now, that's better, isn't it?" The monster removed his hand and backed to the corner of the bedroom, where he sat cross-legged looking like the Buddha of the lizards. His pointy ears scraped against the ceiling when he turned his head.

Effrom looked at the door. The monster was perhaps eight feet away from it. If he could get through it, maybe... How fast could a beast that size move in the confines of the house?

"Your jammies are all wet," the monster said. "You should change or you'll catch your death."

Effrom was amazed at the reality shift his mind had made. He was accepting this! A monster was in his house, talking to him, and he was accepting it. No, it couldn't be real.

"You're not real," he said.

"Neither are you," the monster retorted.

"Yes I am," Effrom said, feeling stupid.

"Prove it," the monster said.

Effrom lay on the bed thinking. Much of his fear had been replaced by a macabre sense of wonder.

He said: "I don't have to prove it. I'm right here."

"Sure," the monster said, incredulously.

Effrom climbed to his feet. Upon rising he realized that the creak in his knees and the stiffness he had carried in his back for forty years were gone. Despite the strangeness of this situation, he felt great.

"What did you do to me?"

"Me? I'm not real. How could I do anything?"

Effrom realized he had backed himself into a metaphysical corner, from which the only escape was acceptance.

"All right," he said, "you're real. What did you do to me?"

"I kept you from croaking."

Effrom made a connection at last. He had seen a movie about this: aliens who come to Earth with the power to heal. Granted, this wasn't the cute little leather-faced, lightbulb-headed alien from the movie, but it was no monster. It was a perfectly normal person from another planet.

"So," Effrom said, "do you want to use the phone or something?"

"Why?"

"To phone home. Don't you want to phone home?"

"Don't play with me, old man. I want to know why Travis was here this afternoon."

"I don't know anyone named Travis."

"He was here this afternoon. You spoke with him  -  I saw it."

"You mean the insurance man? He wanted to talk to my wife."

The monster moved across the room so quickly that Effrom almost fell back on the bed to avoid him. His hopes of making it through the door dissolved in an instant. The monster loomed over him. Effrom could smell his fetid breath.

"He was here for the magic and I want it now, old man, or I'll hang your entrails from the curtain rods."

"He wanted to talk to the wife. I don't know nothin' about any magic. Maybe you should have landed in Washington. They run things from there."

The monster picked Effrom up and shook him like a rag doll.

"Where is your wife, old man?"

Effrom could almost hear his brain rattling in his head. The monster's hand squeezed the breath out of him. He tried to answer, but all he could produce was a pathetic croak.

"Where?" The monster threw him on the bed.

Effrom felt the air burn back into his lungs. "She's in Monterey, visiting our daughter."

"When will she be back? Don't lie. I'll know if you are lying."

"How will you know?"

"Try me. Your guts should go well with this decor."

"She'll be home in the morning."

"That's enough," the monster said. He grabbed Effrom by the shoulder and dragged him through the door. Effrom felt his shoulder pop out of its socket and a grinding pain flashed across his chest and back. His last thought before passing out was, God help me, I've killed the wife.