The House Read online

  Camera equipment, the words, for no apparent reason, impacted Melvin's mind.

  "I'll never forget it," Funk went on. "I'd only been on the force a year then, and I was first on the scene. I personally lifted those prints off that knife, too, I'll tell you."

  If they ID'd him, Melvin reasoned, they must know his name. "What was his name?"

  "No, sir, I'll never forget that name. The worst murderer in the history of this fine county. Um-hmm. Something I want more than anything in the world would be to nab that sick psycho after all these years."

  Melvin tried not to roll his eyes. "I'm sure, Sheriff. What did you say his name was?"

  "D'arava was his name. D'arava."

  Melvin looked at him blankly. "What was his first name?"

  "Leonard."

  The sun crept down on Sheriff Funk's back when he retreated to his cruiser and drove away.

  "Leonard," Melvin whispered to himself. The cruiser's tires were crunching down the hill. His curiosity was what dismayed him more than anything else. What difference did the killer's name make? It was almost thirty years ago. Why had he felt so compelled to ask?

  The oddity had impacted him as well. Yes, Leonard. Gwyneth called me that name by mistake earlier today, he couldn't help but remember.

  But...so what? Lots of people were named Leonard. Leonard Nimoy. Elmore Leonard. Sugar Ray Leonard. It was just a coincidence.

  Melvin went back in the house. He was actually getting hungry. "Gwyneth?" he called out. "I'm heating the food up now." He set the proverbial cardboard containers in the oven and turned up the heat. "Gwyneth?" A smirk felt sealed on his face. Where is she now? He looked in her bedroom, then checked the rest of the house.

  No Gwyneth.

  The floozy must still be outside, and it'll be dark soon, he thought. His aggravation climbed. How embarrassing! Silly space cadet standing out there and not even saying hello to the cop! She looked like she was on drugs or something! That's just what we need the chief of the county sheriff's department to think!

  Before he forgot, though, he needed to jot down some more notes. Sheriff Funk had corroborated still more of the history of the house. And now I even know the ax-murderer's name...

  But Melvin just stared when he sat down at the laptop, about to type in the data. There, at the bottom of the note file just under the last line he'd previously written, were these words typed cleanly in good old 12-point Arial type:

  GIVE US OUR JUNK, LEONARD!

  The screen stared back at him. Leonard rubbed his face, then shook his head.

  "Leonard," he muttered. "What the hell is going on?"

  He knew he didn't type that himself. How did it get there?

  Next, he muttered, "Gwyneth..."

  If I didn't type it, she did...and I KNOW I didn't type it, and today she even CALLED me Leonard...

  He stood up quickly, grinding his teeth. He felt very, very determined and even a little mad, and these were rare emotions for Melvin.

  Was she playing some kind of a joke on him?

  Melvin had been the brunt of jokes his entire life, and he was getting damn tired of it.

  "Gwyneth!" he bellowed. "Where are you...damn it! I want to know why you wrote this crap on my computer!"

  His uncharacteristic bellow shuddered through the house. There was no response, of course, and when he searched every room again, there was no sign of her.

  Of course.

  Back in the kitchen, he turned his head, looked out the window. The old dog-pen could be seen, and the blades of grass appeared a fiery, shimmering orange from the sinking sun.

  And there was Gwyneth, too, right there in the yard in front of the pens.

  Suddenly the most abstract—as well as absurd—thought occurred to him. Every time I look at Gwyneth, my mind sees her differently. It's like I'm looking through the eye of a film director...

  More macro-vision. Every detail came into the most severe focus, the molten light of the minute before dusk sweeping the grassy yard and caressing Gwyneth. He could see the diminutive veins in her feet, the costal groove of each rib beneath the dress fabric, the convolutions of her ears. He could see each individual cilia of her eyelashes, and he could even detect the imperceptible prominence of her cornea and the separate flecks of her emerald-and-ice-blue irises.

  My God...

  It was almost too surreal to look at. This magnification of details dizzied him. But even more shocking than the way he was seeing her...was what she was doing.

  My God, he thought again.

  Gwyneth was squatting over the plush grass between the house and the dog-pen. Her elegant fingers had hiked the dress up to her waist. Her back was arched and her knees were parted as widely as her joints would permit. This extremity of posture opened the beautiful furred pubis like the prettiest hot-house flower, petals impossibly cringing as they spread.

  To put it in technical lexicon, she was aspirating the contents of her urinary bladder. And not so technically?

  She was pissing like a fucking racehorse.

  The index and middle finger of one hand were V'd, their pads pressed firmly to either side of the tea-rose-pink clitoral hood which not only bared the almond-sized clitoris itself (to dazzling detail) but raised the upper interior minus of the vaginal canal. More excruciating detail then: Melvin's supereal vision could even detect the tiny, tender metus of the opening of her urethra, a shining pink pin-hole.

  Her urine arced out of her in a golden, ice-like cascade, the light of dusk filling the stream with roving facets of glints more beautiful than gem-dust.

  The look on Gwyneth's face, as she continued to offer her piss to the earth, was an expression of angelic rapture.

  Melvin's eyes darted up against their will, to his stepmother's mouth. The delectable tongue slowly slipped out and glazed the lips. Then the finger of her other hand floated upward to receive a portion of crystalline saliva. Just as slowly, the fingertip lowered, positioned itself precisely between the V'd fingertips of her other hand, and gently caressed the saliva over the clitoris, rubbing a lazy circle.

  The sensation caused her toes to flex in the grass. Her stomach and thigh muscles tightened, and the gentle arc of urine lifted as if excited by the pleasures of its host.

  Gwyneth's expression was now one of new-found bliss, her eyes closed, lips parted, her face upturned to the sky. When she'd finished urinating, she lowered herself to hands and knees, crawled forward. She looked as though she were in some reverent trance, as though she worshiped the ground beneath her. She kissed the damp grass, then ran her hands through the blades and brought them to her face.

  Melvin's macro-vision switched off.

  It was impossible for him to imagine the meaning behind what he'd just witnessed. All he knew was that it was...fucked up.

  There's something wrong with her, it occurred to him. She's a nut, she's crazy. She must have some kind of split personality or something. I'm going to have to tell Dad.

  The back door opened. Gwyneth strode into the kitchen, sipping her bottle of chocolate syrup. She seemed wistful, preoccupied, and particularly normal.

  "Hi, Melvin. Is the Chinese food ready?"

  Melvin stared at her, took a deep breath. "Are you all right?"

  She set the bottle of Hershey's down, then bent over and looked in the oven. "Mmm, that smells good. What did you say?"

  "I asked you if you're all right," he repeated very deliberately.

  "I'm fine." She put on an oven mitt and began to take the containers out. "Why do you ask?"

  Melvin cleared his throat. "I ask," he said, "because you've been acting very strange today."

  Her eyes narrowed. "How so?"

  "Well, let's see. You were walking around in the yard like a zombie when the cop was here, and when I introduced you, you didn't even say anything. You just stared."

  Now she frowned. "What are you talking about?"

  "When the cop was here about a half hour ago."

  "What cop?"
r />   Melvin let out a sharp sigh. "The cop! He was the chief of the county sheriff's department! You just saw me talking to him, but you acted like we weren't there, and a minute ago I look out the window and see you peeing on the grass! And then you rub your face in it! But you look at me like I'm batty when I ask you if you're all right!"

  A long pause unreeled. "Melvin, I have no idea what just came out of your mouth. Cops? Peeing in the grass? Are you nuts?"

  Melvin's frustration inched up. He didn't do well when he was frustrated. "No, Gwyneth, I am not nuts, but I think you are. Are you on drugs or something? Are you on some kind of medication?"

  Gwyneth opened the box full of wedges of shrimp toast. "I'm starting to worry about you, Melvin. Your father told me you were a little odd, a little unbalanced, but he assured me you were functional."

  "Don't try to make it look like I'm the one who's unbalanced!" he nearly shrieked. "And let me ask you something else! Why did you call me Leonard today?"

  "Who's Leonard? I don't even know anybody named Leonard." She crunched into a piece of shrimp toast. "And I never called you Leonard, either. You need to calm down. Did you take a nap earlier, and have a bad dream?"

  Melvin rubbed his eyes and ground his teeth. "No! I did not take a n—"

  "Chill out, Melvin." Her voice was back to that cool, subtly elitist drone. "Relax. Your father explained everything to me about your...problems. You never developed the way most normal, healthy people develop. You're sheltered, you're shy, there's no common ground between your psychological makeup and the regular world. And this is okay. I'm okay, you're okay."

  Melvin was outraged. "What are you talking about!"

  "It's Freudian, Melvin. You have a tremendous intellectual capacity, so you must realize that."

  "Freudian!"

  "Yes, Melvin. It's Freudian. It's sexual." Now she was fingering through the Crispy Sesame Beef, searching for a big piece. "It all goes back to the sensorial indoctrination of our formative years. You're not emotionally evolved because you're sexually repressed. You're retentive instead of expulsive. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Your father told me all about it."

  Melvin's face felt like boiling meat. "All about what?"

  "That you've never been with a woman. You're a 33-year-old male virgin."

  Now Melvin's eyes bugged out. Oooooo, that PRICK! That BASTARD! How could his own father embarrass him like this? She was laying a bunch of silly California Dr. Phil psycho-babble on him, making him look ridiculous and out of control simply because he wasn't secure around members of the opposite sex! His father had reduced him to a pathetic pud!

  "That's a lot of repression, Melvin. By your age? I don't want you to think that I'm being egotistical but I am in fact a very sexually provocative woman. I'm more beautiful than the typical social archetype. You and I in the same house together, alone, without your father's protective arm around you... Well, that's causing you to come a little unglued, that's all. You're frustrated because I'm sexually unavailable to you just as all women are, but due to our very close proximity right now... You're struggling. My sexuality is stressing you out and it's producing this side-effect. A cataclysm of symbols and fantasies."

  Melvin's temples throbbed. He couldn't speak. She was out-psychologizing him, even though he was ten times smarter than her.

  Now she was into the Triple Delight, plucking up a straw mushroom and a shrimp, talking as she chewed. "Your sexual frustration is projecting fantasies into your psyche. This police officer, for instance. There was no police officer but you thought there was because of what the police symbolize: the universal phallic symbol, the gun being the hard penis that can conquer all. And this reference to a person named Leonard. Obviously it's something you've consciously forgotten, probably from your adolescence or pre-adolescence. I'm sure there was some boy in junior high—some boy named Leonard—who was popular, charismatic, and handsome, the boy who made all those pretty little 13-year-old girls' hearts go aflutter. The boy you wanted to be. And now, in your fantasy-syndrome, you think you hear me calling you Leonard."

  Melvin had tears in his eyes. He sat down with a thud. When he objected—quite weakly now—his words came out as if he were being strangled: "What about you PISSING in the yard? I suppose I fantasized that too, right? It's some covert Freudian symbol resurfacing in the midst of my sexual inadequacy—"

  Gwyneth clapped her hands together once. "Finally! You're understanding your own maladjustments! Your inability to achieve sexual release with a member of the opposite sex has turned you into a retentive personality type. You're holding it all in. So you fantasize seeing me—the object of your natural sexual impulse—letting it all out."

  Melvin rubbed his face, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. He'd never felt like a bigger loser in his life.

  My God, his thoughts croaked. Maybe she's right.

  Could this be? Could his perceptions have broken so completely from reality? I've never been laid in my life, he realized. Could all that sexual repression really make me hallucinate?

  "Aw, don't be upset, Melvin," she offered, munching. "Self-revelation is a good thing. You're understanding more about yourself now, and it's my desirability that's the catalyst. This is all actually very positive."

  Melvin began to sob.

  "Melvin, Melvin, don't cry. You'll feel better once you've thought about it all, processed it into terms you can deal with." She thrust a carry-out box toward him. "Here, have a dumpling."

  He looked up, red-faced. "I don't want a fuckin' dumpling. I know I'm not hallucinating. I know none of this is some fantasy projection. Because I KNOW—beyond all certainty—that I did not write that on my laptop."

  Gwyneth looked bewildered. "Write what on your laptop?"

  "That name. Leonard. I'm one-hundred-percent positive that I didn't write it. So that means you did."

  She rolled her eyes. "Come on, Melvin. Show me."

  He picked himself up and walked over to the pantry with her. He pointed. "There. Look on the screen. You know what's there because you wrote it."

  His eyes followed his finger, then his knees went weak and he staggered out of the room, moaning.

  The laptop screen was blank.

  (IV)

  Melvin slept fitfully in his back bedroom. Was a cold coming on? A headache cut into the front of his brain just above his eyes, and his throat felt rough. He figured the best way to process the frustrating scene with Gwyneth was to not process it at all. Just forget about it and go to sleep, he drowsily ordered himself. And that's what he tried to do.

  Snippets of noise from dreams kept waking him. He knew they were from dreams, however, because each time, once his eyes were opened, he found himself staring into total silence. The dream-noises had come along in an annoying array: soft footsteps, the sound of earth being shoveled, dogs barking.

  A slice of moonlight cut into the room and somehow made it seem larger. When he woke next, he dimly recalled a gush of dream-fragments:

  A very thin girl in nothing but a man's long T-shirt lying unconscious or dead on the living room floor.

  A tall, effeminate-looking black man sitting on a ratty couch, dressed in an atrocious tan leisure suit and a chocolate-brown silk shirt, the collar sticking up.

  A bag of groceries on a table, containing mostly cans of Giant-brand dog food.

  A garishly lit room with plastic drop cloths on the floor.

  This time when he woke up, he frowned. What was that all about? Now the sore throat raged, and he was sweating. Not the flu again! He seemed to get it once or twice a year for as long as he could remember. His fatigue pressed down on him like a heretic being squashed by rocks. Oh, jeez, just go to sleep! His travel clock on the nightstand read 2:07 a.m.

  He drifted off yet again. This time the dream wasn't a fragment—it unreeled. He dreamed he was walking choppily through the house, like a strip of film with every other frame spliced out. He knew it was the same house even though it was clearly different. Stains b
lotched the wallpaper and seedy, water-damaged carpet. He lurched into the kitchen and found it filled with old white-enameled appliances from the '50s or '60s. He looked out the window through some strange visual grain like movies shot on 16 millimeter and spied three dogs—a mutt, a Collie and a German Shepard—mange-flecked, tongues lolling as they slept under crisp moonlight. More jerky steps propelled him into the living room and its nearly rotten couch. Curious crusty splotches stained the threadbare cushions. Several tiny plastic bags littered the floor, plus a flickering candle in a clunky pewter holder. A lamp stood on a cigarette-burned end table, its shade stained and crooked, its light hovering in a strange orange gloom. In the corner a cockroach feasted on a bit of something unknown.

  When voices issued from the hallway which led to the bedrooms, Melvin suddenly couldn't move, as though he were indeed in a piece of film and the projector had been paused.

  "I...guess that's a print," came a discouraged male voice.

  Then a huskier one: "He called me a, a, a dago moron whop motherfucker."

  But the next voice was shrill and decidedly female, backed by a whine of outrage. "We were about to fire up and the little fucker barges in here trying to eat us, and the bag of junk was on the floor and he ate it! He ate the candles too!"