The Architecture of Fear (34 page)

"Wheels within wheels," Mrs. Dennis tells the ceiling.

Reminisces Gina Callan:

—Our first years together, Wes had no faith but pro football. About four years ago, though, a doctor at Fitzsimmons botched the prostate surgery he needed. Wesley nearly died. These Witnesses got to him while he was suffering, talked to him, studied with him, poured their propaganda on him. He was down so far he bought it. Kenny says if only the Buddhists or the Hare Krishnas had reached him first, Wesley'd be that today instead. I wish they had.

I guess Wes was easier to take as a Denver Bronco fan than as a religious zealot?

—You bet. He wouldn't celebrate birthdays or Christmas. He wouldn't even buy me a stupid Valentine. He was afraid one of the brothers or sisters would call him "frivolous." That's when Kenny started to get fed up with
him.

"I'm almost finished, Mrs. Callan." Mrs. Dennis leans back on her stool, studies her subject, and then removes the dead woman's glasses from their leather case and sets them on her nose, snugging the ear struts into her bouffant hairdo.

—I went into the hospital terrified, the bespectacled Gina Callan tells her hostess. I remembered how one of their lousy doctors nearly killed Wes, and
I
was afraid to die, afraid they'd push me to it the way they'd almost done him.

I suppose it's a cliche, Mrs. Dennis rejoins, but there are worse things than dying.

—Fear's one, admits the dead woman. And when I was really hurting, retaining water and so on, one of those army dorks... Wes called 'em
dorktors
right to their face, but they always seemed just to think he talked funny... came into my room and said, "Mrs. Callan, you're dying. I think you should know. You've probably only got a few more hours." He didn't ask Wes, he didn't ask Kenny, he just took it upon himself to tell me.

My God, thinks Mrs. Dennis, genuinely appalled.

—That did it. That whomped the heart right out of me. Maybe some people'd be grateful to be told, but not me. I was thinking I'd make it, but what he said was absolutely chilling. I was... well, the only word that says it is
horror-struck.

Mrs. Callan, I can imagine.

—They'd been taking me on and off various monitors and kidney machines, and sticking me with needles, and running plastic tubes in and out of me, and, well, I didn't last till morning. Kenny and Wesley sat there helpless beside me as I passed on. And being dead hasn't been half so bad as going terrified into the hospital and being told by some army quack—that
dorktor,
as Wes'd call him—that I was dying.

To herself, not to the woman's corpse, Mrs. Dennis thinks, How much more of this am I going to be able to stand?

—Know what terrifies me now? What ruins the death snooze I'm entitled to after sixty-seven years working and worrying?

No, ma'am. What?

—Wes'll be okay. He's got his religion to fall back on. But what's to become of Kenny?

Thinks Mrs. Dennis consolingly, He'll be okay, too.

—No. No, he won't. He never learned any responsibility. It was my fault, mine and Ernesto's, but poor Kenny's gonna be the one to pay for it. He's a baby. Still a baby...

***

Aunt Dot, Cousin Claudia, and Melinda Jane return from their shopping expedition. Mrs. Dennis and her subject can hear them coming down the carpeted stairs. The menfolk rise to greet them, while Aunt Martha blurts, "Those are wonderful, Dot. Those are Gina, all right. They're unquestionably Gina."

The women come crowding in, warning Kenny, Sarge, Lyle, Vince, and Frank to stay put. This is a female matter, cosmeticizing Gina, and Kenny and the guys will be allowed to look at her again only when Aunt Dot says she's presentable. Mrs. Dennis consents to their invasion—even though she cannot help feeling that they are barging into a torture chamber, not merely coming home with bangles with which to adorn their dead.

Melinda Jane shuts the door behind them.

"Ta da," says Claudia. She holds up a pair of beaten-brass earrings, with artificial pearls in the center of each clip.

"Thank God you got clip-ons," Mrs. Dennis tells her. "I know she had pierced ears, but the holes've closed up."

"Clip-ons, schlip-ons," Claudia replies. "All that matters is for 'em to look like her. These do."

"Big and jangly," says one of the aunts.

"Gina through and through," says the other.

Everyone in the Memory Room stares down at the dead woman. The hostess realizes that her subject, who stopped transmitting at the first sound of the women's return, is basking in their approval. For the first time since entering the mortuary, Gina Callan feels good about herself.

"Okay," says Aunt Dot, taking a deep breath and wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "Get Kenny in here."

Someone opens the door. The men bunch up, squeeze through, and approach the casket. Kenny shoulders his way to the front.

"Whaddaya think?" Martha asks. "Isn't that more like it?"

For a moment, Kenny merely stares. His bug eyes dart from his mother's hands to her rouged face and back again. Then he turns and, locating Mrs. Dennis, reaches out and grabs her hands.

"This is my mother," he tells her. "You goofballs finally got it right."

"Thank you. Your relatives helped."

"She's beautiful again—as beautiful as I remember."

"Thank you," repeats the hostess.

"You found her glasses. Her picture, too."

"One of our employees found them. Heather Thompson."

"Heather Thompson deserves a raise," Kenny cries. "I'm gonna buy her a box of candy. You, too. Both of you."

He releases Mrs. Dennis, turns again to the casket, and lifts his arms in a dramatic gesture of thanksgiving.

"This is my mother," he proclaims. "God bless everybody here for giving me back my mother."

***

Alone again with the bereaved dead woman, Mrs. Dennis sits down wearily on her stool.

—Wes never came, Gina Callan tells her. And Kenny's gonna be lost without me. Absolutely lost.

"Shut up!" the hostess shouts, trying to reclaim her room. "Do you think you're the only goddamn stiff whose troubles I've got to listen to? Is that what you think?"

Gina Sekas Petruzzi Callan ceases to transmit.

"That's better," Mrs. Dennis whispers, cupping her face in her hands. "Who the hell do you guys think you are, anyway?"

John M. Ford, winner of the World Fantasy Award for his novel
The Dragon Waiting,
also has the marvelous ability to lead readers by the hand through the incomprehensible to harsh enlightenment. Here, Ford juggles metaphor and yarn, tradition and cliche into a terrifying gestalt whirlwind, and traps the unwary by saying, "It's just a story, just another of my tales from the original gothic."

It was six-oh-nine ay em out on Long Island Sound, and foggy, and cold. We were technically representing the National Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. Boudreau and I were Center, observational, him video, me still, you Jane. Clement and Phail were M.I.T., hardware jockeys. Ormsby was spooky—we didn't know which agency, and they're all under orders to lie about that these days; spreads the blame around. Father Totten was direct from the Archdiocese of New York, something about eminent domain. He told me he was a qualified exorcist. I told him I was working on my biceps. He laughed the way you do when you've heard it once too often.

We had a van full of equipment: spectrometers and chromatographs, magnetometers and scintillation counters, shotgun mikes and hand-held radar. We had a real live robot, a little tank-tracked wire-guided sample-snatcher known variously as Stupid, That Piece of Shit, and Danger Will Robinson. We had, oh, lots of good stuff and lead-lined steamer trunks in case we found anything worth taking home. Personally, I had five Hasselblads with two dozen assorted camera backs, long lenses, filters like a
Playboy
shooter might only dream of, slow fine film and insanely fast film and infrared and X-ray and Polaroid and you don't care what else. If the damn house showed up I was going to get a picture of it or, by God and George Eastman, know the reason why not.

There were two TV trucks, one from the network pool and one indie, and a helicopter of uncertain parentage, but if you said Air America at them they might smile back. The house wouldn't dare not show.

This was the seventh apparition, best that we could tell. First three were anecdotal (to wit: nobody believed a word of it), fourth independently confirmed (to wit: eighty witnesses in Grant Park, Chicago), fifth confirmed and documented (to wit: television mobile crew looking for background shots in Golden Triangle Park, Pittsburgh), sixth confirmed and tagged for active response (to wit: two Senators whose morning field lecture on the need for direct intervention against you know who, you know where, was upstaged by the appearance behind them).

The data points went into a big computer designed to extrapolate impact points and fallout patterns, and the computer drew a map and posted a time. So here we were (to wit: to woo).

Six-eleven. See, all that nattering only took a couple minutes. Time is all relative when you're freezing your butt off waiting for a supernatural manifestation to manif. The computer said six-fifteen, but time was the loosest part of the prediction, because nobody had reported exactly seeing the thing appear: they just looked up and—

There it was.

Shit, we gasped, or maybe, Gasp, we shat. The house surprised us. How do you think that looks on your resume,
Once ambushed by a house?

I fumbled my fingers onto my shutter switches and started tripping the light. Boudreau spun up a standard and a highspeed film camera, pressed his eye to his video rig. Clement and Phail played their instruments like dueling jazz drummers. Ormsby did something—I assume what he was supposed to do. (When he joined the party he said, "Good morning, I've been attached to your unit." Makes you think of a lamprey, right? Ormsby the Sucker, Yup.)

Oh, and Father Totten made the sign of the Big X. Thanks, Father, for sharing that with us.

It was three stories high, Victorian, high-floored and gabled, maybe sixty feet from porch to peak, and with that Victorian vertical style that made it look even taller. There was gingerbread all over, spindles and doily-edging. Mansard roof, hexagonal shingles. Thin windows with shutters. A great portico in front, with thin white pillars going up to the second floor. We'd seen the Pittsburgh videotape, and it looked like that, but—but that was
videotape,
a comb-filtered picture on a tin box. This was live, wide-screen. I almost said palpable, but that wouldn't be right. It was there, but not quite real yet.

It was very gray. The fog was still heavy, and muted everywhere, but the house was a deep, slaty, shifty color, as if the fog itself had condensed and gelled to make it, which was at the time just as good a guess as anybody's. The wood trim was white, and there was some green-painted ironwork, but that too had the grayness. The house wasn't more than fifty yards away from us, but it might have been miles; the moon through a cloud.

"Is it real?" Ormsby said. Terrific question, Ormsby.

"We got it on the radar," Phail said.

"I want contact," Ormsby said, and I looked up and Clement looked up; nobody'd quite properly explained to us that what Ormsby wanted made any special difference, but the way he talked and looked, you could tell that it did and he knew it. "Is the robot ready?"

"Ready as it'll ever be," Clement said, and picked up the control box. "What do you
want
it to do?"

"Physical contact first. Run it right up to those stairs and see if it hits anything."

"Okay, Stupid," Clement said, to the robot, sort of, and pushed the sticks. The robot whined and started crawling toward the porch, trailing its cables behind it.

Then the front door opened, and the woman came out. Shit, gasp, in spades. Clement nearly dropped his controls; the robot veered over and went crash-bump against the steps. Contact.

She came down the stairs, seeming not to see the robot. I grabbed a long lens to look at her; she didn't seem to see anything at all, but God her eyes were beautiful. Her face was beautiful, lineless as new porcelain, framed in dark hair. My hand wobbled too badly to watch her through the telephoto.

She was wearing a nightgown, smoke-gray, like the house not a precise color but shifting, and she was carrying a long silver candlestick. The second report had mentioned this, but, like I said, nobody paid any attention to the second report. Oh, and one other thing, I looked up. There it was: one light shining from the attic window.

Now do you see why the early reports got shitcanned? We don't all live within stone walls of canker'd reason, but there are limits, and the cover of a paperback romance showing up in downtown Spokane is damn it one of them.

Ormsby said, "Is she solid?"

Phail said, "Huh?"

"On the radar."

"I... don't know. She might not show up, so close to the house."

"What can you use on her?"

"Uh... the spec unit's lasers."

"Okay, do it. Clement, get the robot over to her."

I snapped frames as fast as my motor drives would hum. Boudreau had it easy: all he had to do was stare with his trigger finger down. The priest was saying something in Latin, I didn't know what.

Clement got the robot backed up. "Come on, junkheap," he muttered. "Nice and slow now."

The woman was down the steps now, walking across the soft ground, more or less toward us. Her gown drifted on the air, mist on mist: it seemed light as spidersilk, but was remarkably opaque for all that. Her arms were bare, and there was a vague hint of cleavage. She should have been shivering like a birch in a hurricane. I blew out a cloudy breath and realized that hers wasn't fogging.

Clement had the robot a couple of steps behind her now, and started working the manipulator. It wasn't a very sophisticated arm, just a one-joint with a clamp on the end. It stretched up toward the woman's gown like a lecherous metal midget.

Then it stopped. Short. Clement struggled with the control sticks for a moment—and then his arms spasmed and he gagged and fell down, twitching like a stunned steer. The robot was smoking, and the cable, and Clement.