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.