“Hand me that thing that looks a bit like a small movie projector, if you please, Mr. McGrue…very good.” He fitted it onto the top of the tripod, and tightened wingnuts to hold it in place. “This is my own new variation of my grandfather’s resonance manipulator. I will be testing it shortly…Ha ha, can you feel the intense electromagnetic field here? Even Tesla would have been impressed. Grandfather knew Tesla, you know, they corresponded…”
“Nikolai Tesla! And your grandfather?”
“Yes. My grandfather was Crawford Tillinghast.” He adjusted the manipulator and swiveled it. “You have perhaps heard of him?”
“I don’t believe so. This humming…this place is giving me a headache…Smells like something’s burning…”
“Crawford Tillinghast was a great scientific genius. His work was suppressed, by the usual bumpkins. I managed to find a way to adapt his system in a more…what is the contemporary expression? Ah! A more ‘user friendly’ way, ha ha! I will induce a localized resonance wave with this device. But it will be limited to a small area in front of the projector. Hand me that octagonal crystal there, please…”
That peculiarly giddy look on Tillinghast’s face, and his odd tendency to articulate each syllable in a burst of laughter—it made McGrue uneasy. “You say your grandfather developed the, um, the prototype of what you have here? It’s kinda funny, you working for the cell phone transmission company, and using something in the job that was developed by your grandfather…”
“Funny? Yes! Ha ha!” He clapped his hands together once and wrung them in quiet delight. “Now, I’ve got the booster ready—and we have the proper convergence of wave-transmissions. I believe we can run a short test, Mr. McGrue!”
McGrue’s mouth felt dry. He felt hot and unsteady. “You feel kind of nauseated? Headachy?”
“Oh, that’s merely the radiation. We’ll soon be done here, for today and the effect will pass. Please be good enough to hold this attenuator…”
He passed McGrue a device that looked like a microphone with two crystal spikes sticking to the sides at the top. “Now, Mr. McGrue, if you will hold that device out at arm’s length…Just take a step back…a foot more…that’s it…and…hold it steady, a trifle higher…” Tillinghast looked through an eyepiece atop the device that resembled a little movie projector. “Ah ha! It’s coming…”
A translucent shimmer emitted from the “projector”. A loud repetitive thudding sound shook the walls, followed by a hum that filled the world. Then, over the floor near the front door an oval shape glimmered, rippled, and formed what looked like a window…
Through the vertical oval, McGrue could see a squirming thing resembling a giant centipede with a human head. Above it fluttered a baby with batwings flashing a long black tongue at another creature that was something like a jellyfish with legs. The odd tableau was lit by a sickly green luminosity.
McGrue was coming to the conclusion that Tillinghast was definitely not a cell phone tower repairman.
Something squished into view, within the oval. It was like a giant slug, big as a bear. It reared up, its front end opened and it inhaled the flying baby, swallowed it down, and then galumphed off.
“Oh, my dear God,” McGrue said. Surely this was an illusion, a video projection, something unreal…
Flying, transparent, wormlike creatures, long as a man’s arm, whipped through the green air in the other world. They squirmed in the air, spitting sparks. Beyond the flying worms was a mist the dull-green of mold—the mist parted, then, to reveal a faintly glowing metal cage. Standing in the cage was a young man, quite human, waving frantically at them…
“There he is!” Tillinghast crowed. “My assistant! I am relieved to see he’s safe. The repulsor cage is holding up! I’m coming, Syl! I’ll be there soon! Hold on!”
Then something that looked like a reptilian goat standing on its hind legs stepped up, within the oval, and blocked the view. It was a goat, a man, a snake all at once. It turned to look through the oval with the wickedest eyes McGrue had ever seen. It hissed and bounded forward, then stopped to sniff the air, squatted as if preparing to leap through…It thrust out a scaly hand red and yellow hand, reaching through the oval, into the room with McGrue and Tillinghast.
McGrue, paralyzed with shock, shouted wordlessly.
Tillinghast said, “Don’t worry, I’ll shut it off, it won’t get through! I hope…”
“The Hell with this!” McGrue forced himself to move. He dropped the attenuator and turned to stagger toward the rail-less staircase leading to the second floor. He pounded up the creaking wooden steps, feeling as if that thing with the murderous look on its face was going to pounce on him from behind at any moment. He reached the second floor where another set of microwave drums aimed at the front windows. A dormer window looked out on the weedy backyard. He kicked at the glass, it shattered, he knocked out the ragged bits with an elbow and climbed through, in his hurry moving as lithely as a young man. There was a ladder from the roof line under the window. He scrambled down it to the overgrown grass, and ran, puffing like a locomotive, for his own house.
Halloween was barely less boring than any other damn night, Brian thought. It was cold up here, it was dark, the crickets were calling, some owl was hooting. Whatever. He wanted to be somewhere else, where there was light, and music, maybe dancing. But all he had was this place, and these guys.
He and the new kid Terry and that older kid Lon and his cousin Bud, and little Rudy who trailed after Bud, were all staring at Old Man McGrue’s house hoping he’d come outside to get egged. That’s what they had in mind this year.
Lon especially liked to go after McGrue, because a few years ago the old guy had tried to get Lon arrested after he chased Andy McGrue off the top of the hill. Brian hadn’t been there, but he’d heard about it. Andy was eight years old, dressed like a fairy—his mom had put fairy wings on him for some reason—and that got Lon and the others making fun of him and Andy’d told them to shut up and they’d chased him, throwing rocks at him, and he’d fallen down a steep hillside, cracked into a rock and….boom, brain damage. So now he had to wear a special helmet and go to a special school and McGrue blamed Lon, calling him the ringleader. Which actually sounded like Lon. So, Lon had been taken to court and his attorney got him off, saying Lon was just a rambunctious eleven-year-old kid.
So here they were, three years later, with a lot of old eggs. They crouched near the weird house with the machine guts in it, and Brian just did not like to be here. He felt the house putting off pulsations, waves, or something. Whatever it was, it was making him feel kind of sick to his stomach.
And he could hear it. Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum. And then would come HUM HUM HUM and then back to Hum. Hum. Hum….
Maybe it was the pot he’d smoked with his Lon’s brother Tommy, but it sure seemed like the hums had another sound in them. Like…Hum—hurt you. Hum—hurt you. Hum—hurt you.
Imagination, that part. Right? But the humming itself was something everyone heard. That’s why Bud thought it was funny to call the place the Hummer.
“I’m sicka hanging here,” he said. “Lon—let’s go around behind his house, throw the eggs at his window!”
“Naw, he’s got it all fenced really good, hard to get over, barb wire along the top. Too high to see over.” Lon spat some of the smokeless tobacco he swiped from his dad. It was already making his teeth brown. “He’d hear us. Probably got a shotgun.”
“He totally has a shotgun,” Bud said.
“Oooh, a shotgun, cooooool,” said young Rudy.
“You’ll think it’s ‘cool’ when it blasts your nuts off,” said Terry, the tall, goopy looking new kid.