To the house’s disappointment (it had been counting on a month or two of drinking in prospective candidates and their questions), Harriet found a boarder without interviewing. Philip, a slim young man, moved in one Saturday with his meager possessions: a beanbag chair, a pole lamp, some TV trays in faux wood, a futon, and a few garbage bags of clothing. There was, of course, the ubiquitous computer.
If anything, Philip was even more silent than Harriet. He, too, eschewed the phone except as a vehicle for sending e-mail. In addition to the click of the computer keys, there was only an occasional “umph” as he trundled his bicycle into the front hall. From the soft wrrrp of the cellophane, the house surmised he ate only frozen dinners baked in the microwave.
The house remained hopeful. Two young people in the same house, surely they would sooner or later realize they were opposite genders and do what that fact entitled them to. The house, though wan, was looking forward to nights of loud and lewd sex.
But Harriet and Philip continued to disappoint it. All through the long winter, the house had to subsist on a scanty menu of some Christmas carolers in December and a visit from Federal Express with a package for which Harriet had to sign. By May, the house was wasting away.
Enough already, it thought. (If it had had feet, it would have stamped them.) It started to whisper in Philip’s ear during the long, dark nights. She wants you. You know she does. And in the mornings, when Harriet went out to get the local paper and Philip drank his instant coffee by the upstairs window: Look at the slut. You’d think she’d put on some clothes. Someday, she’s going to get what she deserves. Philip began to whimper in his dreams.
At first, the house was willing to settle for a rape. One gray afternoon, when Philip wheeled his bike into the hall, the door to Harriet’s bedroom (which had heretofore always closed tightly) creaked open and disclosed a nearly naked Harriet changing into a sweatsuit.
“Sorry,” Philip said, averting his eyes.
“These old houses.” Harriet shrugged. “They shift with the seasons.” She closed the door and propped a chair under it.
“I’ll have to get a hook and eye at Home Depot,” she told a friend in a rare phone conversation. “I should be able to install that myself, don’t you think?”
A bad decision. The house might have given her a reprieve of a week or so if only to enjoy the hubbub of a workman in the house again, asking for instructions, offering comments. Now it decided to go for broke.
That night, Philip’s sleep was haunted by an incessant whisper. YouknowshewantsitYouknowshewantsitYouknowshewantsit. Then a slice of sound like a wind whistling through a broken window. DoItDoItDoIt.
Philip sat up in bed and looked wildly around. He held his head. “No,” he moaned softly. YesYesYes, the house whispered back.
There was, of course, a slight problem. Philip didn’t have a sharp knife to his name. Sharp knives weren’t necessary for frozen dinners. The house nudged Philip to remember that the back stairs led to Harriet’s kitchen and that she had been chopping green peppers for supper.
The stairs should have creaked as Philip crept down them, but they didn’t. The house saw to that. It also shifted slightly so a pale shaft of moonlight lit up the knife on the drainboard.
After that, it was a piece of cake, so to speak. Or a piece of Harriet. The house would have preferred it if Philip had been raving, but Harriet’s pleas of terror were quite enough. Her screams were delicious.
Philip was at a loss to explain how a college honor student who had once been an Eagle Scout could have committed such a heinous crime. “There were these voices,” he kept muttering. The arresting officer was not impressed. Philip’s court-appointed lawyer planned an insanity defense.
Because of the publicity, the house — even though the blood had been scrubbed from the floor and the wallpaper changed yet again — took a long time to sell. The family that finally bought it was large and boisterous, too large for a trailer, too boisterous for a trailer park. There was a new baby that cried, teenagers who worked on old Chevys in the drive. There was a black and brown dog that barked whenever the neighbor drove in next-door, and three cats that came into heat regularly and enticed howling toms to the kitchen porch. The mother shouted and swatted. When the father drank, he shouted, too, and knocked the mother around. She howled, the children sniveled. The TV was on from morning till night, competing with rock music and a ten-year-old who practiced a tuba.
It was a veritable roast-beef dinner of voices. It had been a long time since the house had felt so full. It wasn’t your fault, the house reassured itself, burping up the memory of Harriet’s final plea for mercy. You were starving. Anyone could see that it was self-defense.
Copyright (c); 2005 by Brenda Joziatis.
Sonnet Number 18.1
by Will Ryan
(discovered in an old vellum heap)
Shall I compare thee to a Winter’s night?
Though art more dreadful, dark and frigid too.
The golden Moon doth lend the snowscape light,
Ere soon her Brother warms the scene anew;
Sometimes the wint’ry breezes fail to blow
And often in the air’s a pleasant nip;
Some Winters leave us quite bereft of snow,
And icy paths may also give the slip.
But they unceasing Winter doth appall,
It freezeth to the marrow all you meet;
And only Death shall free us from thy thrall.
Alas, the time has come for that, my Sweet.
Some dirk or bodkin in your heart I’ll stick;
An icicle should nicely do the trick.
The Sound of Justice
by James H. Cobb
James H. Cobb was already established as a writer of futuristic techno-thrillers when he turned his hand to mysteries — going back in time with the change in genre, to the ’fifties and the world of souped-up cars. This is the second story EQMM has published featuring his hot-rodder hero Kevin Pulaski. The Tacoma author’s latest book is Cibola, a space adventure/science fiction novel from Five Star Press.
Author’s note: As a writer, I’m interested in the beginnings of things, be they words, places, or people. Accordingly, I one day asked a question of my friend, former lawman and fellow hot-rodding buff, Kevin Pulaski (of whom I have written elsewhere).
His answer was a derisive snort. “No way did I ever figure on becoming a cop.”
Considering that Kevin is a retired veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, this was quite a revelation. “Not even when you were growing up?”
A second snort. “Hell no. In fact, back in ’forty-eight when I was a snot-nosed high-school kid in Indiana, there were folks in my hometown who considered me to be Fairmont’s premier juvenile delinquent and a major threat to Western civilization.”
This was another revelation. “You, a JD?”
He cocked a gray-frosted eyebrow at me. “Man, I was there when they first came out.”