The House (26 page)
Authors: Edward Lee
This time when he woke up, he frowned.
What was that all about?
Now the sore throat raged, and he was sweating.
Not the flu again!
He seemed to get it once or twice a year for as long as he could remember. His fatigue pressed down on him like a heretic being squashed by rocks.
Oh, jeez, just go to sleep!
His travel clock on the nightstand read 2:07 a.m.
What was that all about?
Now the sore throat raged, and he was sweating.
Not the flu again!
He seemed to get it once or twice a year for as long as he could remember. His fatigue pressed down on him like a heretic being squashed by rocks.
Oh, jeez, just go to sleep!
His travel clock on the nightstand read 2:07 a.m.
He drifted off yet again. This time the dream wasn't a fragment—it unreeled. He dreamed he was walking choppily through the house, like a strip of film with every other frame spliced out. He knew it was the same house even though it was clearly different. Stains blotched the wallpaper and seedy, water-damaged carpet. He lurched into the kitchen and found it filled with old white-enameled appliances from the '50s or '60s. He looked out the window through some strange visual grain like movies shot on 16 millimeter and spied three dogs—a mutt, a Collie and a German Shepard—mange-flecked, tongues lolling as they slept under crisp moonlight. More jerky steps propelled him into the living room and its nearly rotten couch. Curious crusty splotches stained the threadbare cushions. Several tiny plastic bags littered the floor, plus a flickering candle in a clunky pewter holder. A lamp stood on a cigarette-burned end table, its shade stained and crooked, its light hovering in a strange orange gloom. In the corner a cockroach feasted on a bit of something unknown.
When voices issued from the hallway which led to the bedrooms, Melvin suddenly couldn't move, as though he were indeed in a piece of film and the projector had been paused.
"I...guess that's a print," came a discouraged male voice.
Then a huskier one: "He called me a, a, a dago moron whop motherfucker."
But the next voice was shrill and decidedly female, backed by a whine of outrage.
"We were about to fire up and the little fucker barges in here trying to eat us, and the bag of junk was on the floor and he ate it! He ate the candles too!"
"We were about to fire up and the little fucker barges in here trying to eat us, and the bag of junk was on the floor and he ate it! He ate the candles too!"
The final noise Melvin heard was not a human voice but a feisty chortling.
Is that...a pig?
he wondered.
he wondered.
But the noise, the voices, and the decomposing house were all a dream—Melvin realized that even as he stood in the middle of it.
"Hey, buddy..."
The first male voice again. Melvin's dream-paralysis released him. With some trepidation, he turned toward the hall whose opening stood like an oblong, black maw. The other voices had drifted from the same direction but they'd sounded more distant. This voice, however...
It sounded
right there.
right there.
"Here," it said next. "If you let yourself, you can see us."
Creep me out,
Melvin thought. He stood now clenched in a very genuine fear.
Muh-muh-muh-maybe this isn't a dream...
Melvin thought. He stood now clenched in a very genuine fear.
Muh-muh-muh-maybe this isn't a dream...
"It's one thing becoming something else." The voice rang in an etched clarity. "Think about this, this point I'm about to make. It's all fucked up but it also makes perfect sense. This: An image in a piece of film is like a ghost."
Melvin stared at the hall's opening. The burned-orange light from the dim lamp seemed to darken, and the grain-flecked blackness before him seemed to very slowly swirl.
The voice sounded confident, nonchalant. "Close your eyes and turn your head to the right."
Melvin did so.
"Now, open your eyes."
Again, Melvin did so, and shouted once. In the entrance to the kitchen a wan and very emaciated brunette woman stood. Naked, slat-ribbed, pale as cream. She looked back at him with black, bottomless eyes. From one hand dangled a black Teflon frying pan.
"That's him?" she asked and smirked.
The male voice again: "Close your eyes and look to the left."
Melvin, this time, was less enthused to do so but he did anyway, his fear somehow releasing a strange masochistic adrenalin.
"Open."
Melvin shouted louder, twice. This time it was a blonde. She too was naked, and if anything, even more emaciated than the brunette. She sat indecorously leg-spread on the ratty couch. Strings of needle-marks like lines of black pepper coursed over her bony feet, up and down the insides of her arms and thighs. Lanky blond hair hung in a dirty tangle as she looked down intently on some task. Virtually no fat existed on the corpse-like wax-paper body. Stained teeth were gnashed behind thin, bloodless lips as she daintily tried to empty a hypodermic needle into a wormlike blue abdominal vein.
"Oh, damn it, damn it," she sobbed in the most desperate frustration. "All my veins are collapsed. I don't have any good ones left anymore! I can't fire up!"
Melvin closed his eyes again, shuddering. The only relief from this horrific, dark-orange world he'd stepped in was just that: closing his eyes.
He knew what the next instruction would be.
"Keep your eyes closed and turn your head towards me."
"Nuh-nuh—no," Melvin braved, eyes squeezed shut. "I'm not going to."
Two small, bony, and very, very cold hands pressed against his cheeks from behind and turned his head.
"Open."
Fingertips now, thin as a skeleton's, gingerly pried open his eyelids.
A thin gawky man in his mid-'30s stood in the darkness of the hall's mouth. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR. He had hair like Carrot Top (only it was dark brown), stooped shoulders, and a neck that was, if anything, longer than Melvin's.
He's a geek... Just like me!
There were several details, though, that Melvin lacked. For one, Melvin didn't have a fire-ax resting against his shoulder, and, two, he wasn't spattered in blood.
"Remember. An image in a piece of film is like a ghost. I can't say it outright—I'm not allowed. You have to use your brain, but you're pretty smart, aren't you?"
Melvin gulped and nodded.
"Good," the man said. "Greener pastures are closer than you think."
Melvin frowned in spite of his fear. "
What?
"
What?
"
"Close your eyes."
Melvin did so.
Hollow silence now. Melvin wasn't sure how long he stood there with his eyes closed. Probably many minutes. What he dreaded more than anything—anything thus far in his life, perhaps—was the command to open his eyes again.
But the command never came.
When he finally did re-open them, he found himself standing in the living room—the
real
living room of today, with new paint, new carpet, and brand-new tacky Wal-Mart furniture. The smoldering orange light was gone, replaced by the meager and very normal light from the current table-side lamp.
real
living room of today, with new paint, new carpet, and brand-new tacky Wal-Mart furniture. The smoldering orange light was gone, replaced by the meager and very normal light from the current table-side lamp.
The knock-kneed, gawky phantom standing at the end of the hall was gone, too.
"My God," Melvin whispered to himself. "That was one creepy dream." But creepier still: he'd obviously sleepwalked out here to have it.
It's this flu,
he reminded himself,
this fever.
He remembered hallucinating once before, when he was a child. He'd seen grooves on the bedroom wall, and insects ran up and down the grooves. It was when he'd been sick in bed for several days, with a temperature.
Just a hallucination,
Melvin felt confident,
like that time when I was little.
He'd had a serious flu then, too.
It's this flu,
he reminded himself,
this fever.
He remembered hallucinating once before, when he was a child. He'd seen grooves on the bedroom wall, and insects ran up and down the grooves. It was when he'd been sick in bed for several days, with a temperature.
Just a hallucination,
Melvin felt confident,
like that time when I was little.
He'd had a serious flu then, too.
This all made sense, of course. However, Melvin didn't readily acknowledge to himself that he felt fine now. No sore throat, no headache, no fever.
The geek-wraith's words fluttered in the back of his mind.
Greener pastures are closer than you think,
and as he recited the words back to himself he found himself gazing uncannily at the bargain-basement painting hanging over the couch.
Greener pastures are closer than you think,
and as he recited the words back to himself he found himself gazing uncannily at the bargain-basement painting hanging over the couch.
Hills and vibrant green fields...and a pasture.
Coincidence,
he thought after a pause.
he thought after a pause.
Melvin stiffened from a start. Something had clattered in the kitchen. Instead of feeling scared, he felt foolish: standing in the living room in the middle of the night in only a T-shirt and Fruit o' the Looms.
"Hi, Melvin," a very brazenly naked Gwyneth offered when he peeked into the kitchen. "What are you doing up this late?"
"I..." His vision locked—as it always did now—on the plush, raving body. The kitchen light was out; it was the refrigerator light, instead, that lit every detail of Gwyneth as she stood bent over before the opened door. Her breasts hung, nipples depending. Her angel-food-cake-white buttocks jutted elegantly. She was reaching in to withdraw one of the boxes of carry-out Chinese.
"I had a screwy dream," Melvin finally said.
"Really? So did I." She stood erect now, examining the box's contents. The fridge light cast her bosom as a magnificent bas-relief of orbicular white and black. Her belly button was a beautiful little black hole, her pubic thatch glowing like a nest of butterscotch syrup spun to floss.
Melvin's penis jolted in his shorts to a complete spontaneous erection.
"I dreamed I was flying a kite in a pasture," she said.
A pasture.
Great,
he thought. "What's so screwy about that?"
Great,
he thought. "What's so screwy about that?"
"In my other hand I was carrying a bucket."
"A bucket?"
"Yes, just a regular old metal pail," she said. She fingered out a glazed chunk of Crispy Sesame Chicken. "What was your dream?"
Melvin gulped, feeling dismal. "Oh, nothing. It was stupid."
"God, I love left-over Chinese food. Want some?"
"Uh, no." He stood with his hands covering his crotch, hoping she hadn't noticed but doubting that that was the case. "I'm not really hungry."
She looked right back at him, her body poised, hip cocked, breasts shouting in their image. She licked the sweet glaze off her finger very slowly, and Melvin thought,
I'd sell my soul for her finger to be my dick...
I'd sell my soul for her finger to be my dick...
The tease ended. She leaned over again, replaced the box, and as she did so the tiniest smidgen of her pubic tuft could be seen peeking out of her rump. She grabbed a bottle of Hershey's and stuck a straw in it, began to sip.
"Isn't that a little rich?" he asked, pursing his lips.
"I have low blood-sugar. Besides, it's delicious."
"Aren't you afraid you'll get fat?"
She shook her head. "I have high-metabolism. I drink a couple of these a day and don't gain an ounce."
The idea of all that syrup... It made Melvin queasy.
She was back to her self-absorbed, cool drone of voice: "In the morning I'm going to start a new mosaic."
"With the bird bones you found?" Melvin asked because maintaining some facsimile of discourse would keep the image of her body there for a moment more.
"Yes. Plus I'm going to search for more in the woods." Her body fell into a pillowy shadow when she closed the refrigerator door. "It's this place... It's the fuel for my artistry. I feel like Monet at Giverny. I feel like Michelangelo painting the hand of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."
If Melvin's erection hadn't been burning so intensely, he would've collapsed to his knees in laughter.
"I'm glad you're feeling better than you were earlier," she had to add. "You were very upset."
Melvin smirked but just said, "Oh, I'm fine now," because it was so much easier.
"Goodnight," the low drone spake. She drifted back down the hall, slurping her chocolate syrup.
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