“He had memorable mail?”
“According to Jered, Ben Collier subscribed to every magazine published, or it seemed that way. Some not even in English. Every business day Jered delivered five or ten magazines and newspapers to this address. Magazines, he says, are heavy—and he was delivering on foot back then, though the Postal Service gave him a truck last year. That was the first hint that Ben Collier had vanished: Jered complained that there was a stack of magazines deep enough to block the mail slot.”
“What kind of magazines?”
“Everything from Time to the Manchester Guardian. Heavy on current events, but not exclusively.” Tom was bemused. “It’s an eccentricity, but—”
“Not just eccentricity. There’s some pattern here. It’s not a random set—more like a linear equation.” Tom raised his eyebrows; Archer added, “Math is my other hobby. Math was the only high school class I never cut—you remember Mr. Foster? Tall guy, gray hair? Said I had a talent for it. I’m the guy who always reads the puzzles column in Scientific American. ”
Douglas Archer, JD mathematician. Don’t underestimate this man. “It’s not much to go on.”
“It’s absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Just kind of interesting.” Archer put his plate aside and stood up. “Well, anyway. Don’t touch the equipment—it’ll turn itself on. But you might want to play back the tape in the morning.”
“Count on it. Can you stay for coffee?”
“I have a date for a late movie. But let me know what shows.” His smile was mischievous. “Or what doesn’t.”
Archer closed the door behind him, and suddenly the house was hollow and empty.
That night, Tom made the disturbing discovery that he was afraid to go to sleep.
He showered and wrapped himself in a bathrobe and tuned in the “Tonight” show. The chatter was tedious, but he left it on for the sound of human voices. That’s why we all own these boxes, he thought: because they talk to us when there’s no one else home.
But maybe “afraid to sleep” was overstating the case: he wasn’t jittery. It was more like a reluctance to close his eyes in the midst of these curious events. He had convinced himself something was happening here, a kind of subterranean industry, maybe something (if Archer’s history was accurate) that had been happening for a hundred years or more on this spot. Something insectile, something out of the ground; something that loved holes and hidden places. He was developing a sense of it that was almost frighteningly precise. The eyes that regarded him in his dreams were the eyes—not of machines, Archer was wrong; but of something nearly mechanistic in its single-mindedness. A builder’s eyes. But what exactly were they building?
Not something dangerous. Tom felt this to be true; the insects in his dreams weren’t hostile or deadly. But they were fundamentally, utterly strange. It was as if he had reached into a tide pool and touched something that lived there: a variegated, many-limbed polyp so unlike himself that it might have been extraterrestrial.
And of course there was Archer’s video machinery, almost as alien, already whirring away. It had recorded no event and probably wouldn’t. Or maybe—here was a disturbing thought —he would wake up and find the camera dismantled, its useful parts carried away and its carapace open and gutted on the carpet.
He made himself go to bed before the end credits rolled on the “Tonight” show. He lay in the darkness a long time and imagined he could hear the camera whirring in the next room —but surely that was impossible? It was the whirring, more likely, of his own nerves. His own blood pulsing through his ears. He could not stop turning over these questions in his mind, of machines and intelligence and what might have been a faint cry for help; but in time his thoughts tumbled away in odd, skewed directions and he was asleep.
For a second night Tom Winter slept dreamlessly. He woke to the noise of the clock radio, a Seattle AM station emitting prophecies about weather and traffic. Sunlight streamed in through the margin of the curtains, but he felt as if he had just gone to bed. Nothing remained of the night in his memory—except, dimly, the echo of a pervasive hum. It was the sound he imagined a buried dynamo might make.
The sound of his thoughts.
Possibly, the sound of their thoughts.
But he put that idea away.
The kitchen was clean again.
This trick was familiar enough by now that it had ceased to impress him. It was the small details that fascinated. For instance, every minor dot of organic matter had been cleansed from the cardboard pizza sleeve but the box itself was still open at a random angle on the table. Decisions had been made: this is refuse, this is not. And not simple mechanical decisions. Food in the refrigerator was never disturbed. Unopened packages were off limits. There was a logic in it. Repetitive, maybe, but complex and odd. A maid would have tidied away the empty box. A robot would not. But a robot wouldn’t care whether it was caught in the act; a robot wouldn’t wait for the small hours of the night.
The video recorder was still running, still minutes away from eight o’clock. Tom bent past the camera lens and switched it off.
He ejected the tape and discovered his hand was trembling. It took him a good fifteen minutes to hook up the VCR to his TV set … a minute more to rewind the cassette.
He switched on the monitor and when the screen brightened he punched the Play button of the VCR. An image formed and stabilized—the kitchen, rendered odd and sterile by the static camera angle. The phantom numbers at the top left of the screen ticked off 12:01, 12:02—he had still been awake then and when he turned up the sound he could hear the Carson show playing in the background. Somewhere behind the picture tube he was watching the “Tonight” show in his bathrobe. A sort of time loop—but then they’d know all about that.
This was another phantom thought, unbidden and peculiar. He shook it off.
He punched the Fast Forward key.
A noise bar rolled up the screen; the picture flickered. Minutes rolled by too fast to read. But it was the same messy kitchen he had abandoned last night.
1:00 a.m. blinked past.
2:00.
3:00. Nothing happened. Then—
3:45.
He stabbed the Pause key, too late, and backed up.
3:40:01.
3:39:10.
3:38:27.
At exactly 3:37:16 a.m., the kitchen lights had gone off. “Goddamn!” Tom said.
The camera was built to function in ordinary house light but not absolute darkness. The screen remained a gray, impenetrable blank. It was so obvious as to be painful. They had fucking turned the lights out.
He hit Rewind and watched the sequence in real time. But there was nothing to see: only the static picture … and, faintly, the sound of the switch being thrown.
Tock.
Darkness.
And in the background … buried in tape hiss, elusive and barely audible … something that might have been their sound.
A chitinous whisper. The brush of metallic cilia on cold linoleum. The sound of a razor blade stroking a feather.
He didn’t even try to call Archer. He was already late; he locked the front door and climbed into his car.