The House Read online

  The final noise Melvin heard was not a human voice but a feisty chortling.

  Is that...a pig? he wondered.

  But the noise, the voices, and the decomposing house were all a dream—Melvin realized that even as he stood in the middle of it.

  "Hey, buddy..."

  The first male voice again. Melvin's dream-paralysis released him. With some trepidation, he turned toward the hall whose opening stood like an oblong, black maw. The other voices had drifted from the same direction but they'd sounded more distant. This voice, however...

  It sounded right there.

  "Here," it said next. "If you let yourself, you can see us."

  Creep me out, Melvin thought. He stood now clenched in a very genuine fear. Muh-muh-muh-maybe this isn't a dream...

  "It's one thing becoming something else." The voice rang in an etched clarity. "Think about this, this point I'm about to make. It's all fucked up but it also makes perfect sense. This: An image in a piece of film is like a ghost."

  Melvin stared at the hall's opening. The burned-orange light from the dim lamp seemed to darken, and the grain-flecked blackness before him seemed to very slowly swirl.

  The voice sounded confident, nonchalant. "Close your eyes and turn your head to the right."

  Melvin did so.

  "Now, open your eyes."

  Again, Melvin did so, and shouted once. In the entrance to the kitchen a wan and very emaciated brunette woman stood. Naked, slat-ribbed, pale as cream. She looked back at him with black, bottomless eyes. From one hand dangled a black Teflon frying pan.

  "That's him?" she asked and smirked.

  The male voice again: "Close your eyes and look to the left."

  Melvin, this time, was less enthused to do so but he did anyway, his fear somehow releasing a strange masochistic adrenalin.

  "Open."

  Melvin shouted louder, twice. This time it was a blonde. She too was naked, and if anything, even more emaciated than the brunette. She sat indecorously leg-spread on the ratty couch. Strings of needle-marks like lines of black pepper coursed over her bony feet, up and down the insides of her arms and thighs. Lanky blond hair hung in a dirty tangle as she looked down intently on some task. Virtually no fat existed on the corpse-like wax-paper body. Stained teeth were gnashed behind thin, bloodless lips as she daintily tried to empty a hypodermic needle into a wormlike blue abdominal vein.

  "Oh, damn it, damn it," she sobbed in the most desperate frustration. "All my veins are collapsed. I don't have any good ones left anymore! I can't fire up!"

  Melvin closed his eyes again, shuddering. The only relief from this horrific, dark-orange world he'd stepped in was just that: closing his eyes.

  He knew what the next instruction would be.

  "Keep your eyes closed and turn your head towards me."

  "Nuh-nuh—no," Melvin braved, eyes squeezed shut. "I'm not going to."

  Two small, bony, and very, very cold hands pressed against his cheeks from behind and turned his head.

  "Open."

  Fingertips now, thin as a skeleton's, gingerly pried open his eyelids.

  A thin gawky man in his mid-'30s stood in the darkness of the hall's mouth. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR. He had hair like Carrot Top (only it was dark brown), stooped shoulders, and a neck that was, if anything, longer than Melvin's.

  He's a geek... Just like me!

  There were several details, though, that Melvin lacked. For one, Melvin didn't have a fire-ax resting against his shoulder, and, two, he wasn't spattered in blood.

  "Remember. An image in a piece of film is like a ghost. I can't say it outright—I'm not allowed. You have to use your brain, but you're pretty smart, aren't you?"

  Melvin gulped and nodded.

  "Good," the man said. "Greener pastures are closer than you think."

  Melvin frowned in spite of his fear. "What?"

  "Close your eyes."

  Melvin did so.

  Hollow silence now. Melvin wasn't sure how long he stood there with his eyes closed. Probably many minutes. What he dreaded more than anything—anything thus far in his life, perhaps—was the command to open his eyes again.

  But the command never came.

  When he finally did re-open them, he found himself standing in the living room—the real living room of today, with new paint, new carpet, and brand-new tacky Wal-Mart furniture. The smoldering orange light was gone, replaced by the meager and very normal light from the current table-side lamp.

  The knock-kneed, gawky phantom standing at the end of the hall was gone, too.

  "My God," Melvin whispered to himself. "That was one creepy dream." But creepier still: he'd obviously sleepwalked out here to have it. It's this flu, he reminded himself, this fever. He remembered hallucinating once before, when he was a child. He'd seen grooves on the bedroom wall, and insects ran up and down the grooves. It was when he'd been sick in bed for several days, with a temperature. Just a hallucination, Melvin felt confident, like that time when I was little. He'd had a serious flu then, too.

  This all made sense, of course. However, Melvin didn't readily acknowledge to himself that he felt fine now. No sore throat, no headache, no fever.

  The geek-wraith's words fluttered in the back of his mind. Greener pastures are closer than you think, and as he recited the words back to himself he found himself gazing uncannily at the bargain-basement painting hanging over the couch.

  Hills and vibrant green fields...and a pasture.

  Coincidence, he thought after a pause.

  Melvin stiffened from a start. Something had clattered in the kitchen. Instead of feeling scared, he felt foolish: standing in the living room in the middle of the night in only a T-shirt and Fruit o' the Looms.

  "Hi, Melvin," a very brazenly naked Gwyneth offered when he peeked into the kitchen. "What are you doing up this late?"

  "I..." His vision locked—as it always did now—on the plush, raving body. The kitchen light was out; it was the refrigerator light, instead, that lit every detail of Gwyneth as she stood bent over before the opened door. Her breasts hung, nipples depending. Her angel-food-cake-white buttocks jutted elegantly. She was reaching in to withdraw one of the boxes of carry-out Chinese.

  "I had a screwy dream," Melvin finally said.

  "Really? So did I." She stood erect now, examining the box's contents. The fridge light cast her bosom as a magnificent bas-relief of orbicular white and black. Her belly button was a beautiful little black hole, her pubic thatch glowing like a nest of butterscotch syrup spun to floss.

  Melvin's penis jolted in his shorts to a complete spontaneous erection.

  "I dreamed I was flying a kite in a pasture," she said.

  A pasture. Great, he thought. "What's so screwy about that?"

  "In my other hand I was carrying a bucket."

  "A bucket?"

  "Yes, just a regular old metal pail," she said. She fingered out a glazed chunk of Crispy Sesame Chicken. "What was your dream?"

  Melvin gulped, feeling dismal. "Oh, nothing. It was stupid."

  "God, I love left-over Chinese food. Want some?"

  "Uh, no." He stood with his hands covering his crotch, hoping she hadn't noticed but doubting that that was the case. "I'm not really hungry."

  She looked right back at him, her body poised, hip cocked, breasts shouting in their image. She licked the sweet glaze off her finger very slowly, and Melvin thought, I'd sell my soul for her finger to be my dick...

  The tease ended. She leaned over again, replaced the box, and as she did so the tiniest smidgen of her pubic tuft could be seen peeking out of her rump. She grabbed a bottle of Hershey's and stuck a straw in it, began to sip.

  "Isn't that a little rich?" he asked, pursing his lips.

  "I have low blood-sugar. Besides, it's delicious."

  "Aren't you afraid you'll get fat?"

  She shook her head. "I have high-metabolism. I drink a couple of these a day and don't
gain an ounce."

  The idea of all that syrup... It made Melvin queasy.

  She was back to her self-absorbed, cool drone of voice: "In the morning I'm going to start a new mosaic."

  "With the bird bones you found?" Melvin asked because maintaining some facsimile of discourse would keep the image of her body there for a moment more.

  "Yes. Plus I'm going to search for more in the woods." Her body fell into a pillowy shadow when she closed the refrigerator door. "It's this place... It's the fuel for my artistry. I feel like Monet at Giverny. I feel like Michelangelo painting the hand of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."

  If Melvin's erection hadn't been burning so intensely, he would've collapsed to his knees in laughter.

  "I'm glad you're feeling better than you were earlier," she had to add. "You were very upset."

  Melvin smirked but just said, "Oh, I'm fine now," because it was so much easier.

  "Goodnight," the low drone spake. She drifted back down the hall, slurping her chocolate syrup.

  I don't even like her, Melvin realized, outraged by his erection. Its absolute turgidity made him feel a hypocrite. He tried to think it away but...no dice.

  Fatigue drooped his shoulders. He meant to return immediately to bed but found himself turned around in the living room, thinking of the grim hallucinations.

  An image in a piece of film is like a ghost, he recalled the specter's words. Stupid...but weird. Leonard the murderer had been a "film"-maker, and now he was purportedly a ghost. But over time, the human instinct to create rumors would place a ghost in any house where a murder had been committed. It was Melvin's subconscious, he knew, processing the rumors of the house being haunted, then amalgamating the other things he'd learned about the place, and then manufacturing the "ghost," generating a preconceived image of Leonard D'arava, the ax-murderer. That's all, he thought. Nothing really scary about any of it. It's all cerebro-chemical science. It's brain-hormone and synaptic reactivity—the process of human consciousness and its capability to incite imagination.

  He was staring at the picture above the couch, the pasture. Greener pastures are closer than you think... He lifted the picture off the wall—unsure of the roots of the impulse to do so—and saw that it covered a hole in the wall.

  An ugly smell came out. Melvin re-hung the picture and went back to bed.

  The grainy darkness converged. When he closed his eyes, his erection seemed to throb harder in some libidinal objection. It, like the hallucination of Leonard—was making a demand of its own. He tried to blacken his mind, to draw a heavy drape across the incessant image of Gwyneth naked and all her feminine details magnified. The harder he squeezed his eyes shut, the more closely he glimpsed each "part" of her, a camera zooming down on each separate and delectable piece of candy in the box.

  I don't even like her! Why is my mind forcing me to beat off to her image? Why not Pamela Anderson? Why not Paris Hilton? Or—ooo!—the girl in Lifeforce? (Bad movie. Great body!) He felt weak, disgusted with himself when he realized he was pulling his shorts off. He could imagine how he looked now: spread-eagled on the bed in the middle of the night, underpants gone, face twisted up like Shemp's as he stroked his penis. The harder he squeezed his eyes shut, the more brightly he saw Gwyneth's body. His testicles jumped up like yo-yo's. The kaleidoscope of sexual parts spun round and round, then stopped:

  On the dainty pink fur-rimmed vulva plumped up with desire.

  "Ooooooooooooooo," Melvin moaned.

  His ejaculation felt like a long and very fat piece of cooked spaghetti being drawn out of his pee-hole. When his orgasm abated, his hand fell away, his balls dropped to his buttcrack, and he wheezed in a distended breath. In the post-climactic bliss, he truly couldn't move.

  When he opened his eyes, Gwyneth was standing next to the bed, looking down at him.

  Melvin's heart probably literally stopped for several seconds.

  "What are you doing in here!" he bellowed.

  She'd been sipping her chocolate syrup through the straw while she watched, but then she lowered the bottle, brought a finger to her lips, and replied: "Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..."

  She placed a very soft and very warm white hand on his chest and got down on her knees. She was looking right at his spent penis and the impressive ten-inch line of sperm on his belly, and the look in her eyes could've been the look in a wino's eyes when spying a bottle of booze.

  She took the straw out of her syrup bottle.

  She stuck one end in her mouth.

  She lowered the other end to Melvin's belly.

  And—

  "Ssssssslllllllllluuuuuuuuurrrrrp..."

  —sucked up all the semen.

  Then she stood up very slowly and left the room.

  This act comprised the official end to Melvin's first day in the Vinchetti house.

  PART THREE

  (I)

  Melvin wakened close to noon. He noticed no sign of flu, cold, or sore throat. How did I sleep so late? he wondered when he looked first at the sun blazing high in his window and then the clock again.

  But... He stretched and yawned. I feel great!

  He felt great, at least, for a few seconds, then the recollection of everything that happened to him last night hit him on the top of the head like multiple flower pots.

  Sheriff Funk identifying the Vinchetti-house's killer as a man named "Leonard."

  Gwyneth calling Melvin "Leonard."

  Gwyneth denying calling Melvin "Leonard."

  The name "Leonard" on his laptop.

  Gwyneth pissing in the yard and rubbing the piss on her face.

  Gwyneth denying pissing in the yard and rubbing the piss on her face.

  Gwyneth looking right at Sheriff Funk when he came to the house.

  Gwyneth denying that Sheriff Funk had come to the house.

  Melvin sleepwalking into the living room.

  Melvin hallucinating in the living room.

  Melvin masturbating, only to have his sperm sucked off his stomach with a plastic straw.

  Whew!

  All of this, by anyone's standards, would constitute a full day.

  Melvin sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. Oh, man... Unsocialized nerd notwithstanding, Melvin was possessed of far higher than average intellect. The answer to this dilemma could only be found in one of the two following possibilities.

  One, he thought, Gwyneth has a serious psychiatric problem, or...

  Two, I have a serious psychiatric problem.

  Melvin considered that probably the worst thing for him to do was seek the answer immediately. I'm pretty sure I'm not screwed up in the head, so... If it's Gwyneth, I should be able to make that determination soon.

  Or: Time will tell...

  Melvin showered and dressed quickly, then went to find Gwyneth when he noticed an oddity. Dirty footprints had been tracked down the hall all the way back to the back door in the kitchen. What a mess!

  He glanced out the kitchen window into the back yard and saw—

  What the hell did that floozy do!

  —a hole.

  A shovel lay in the grass next to a mound of earth next to where the hole had been dug. And the hole appeared to be on the exact spot where Melvin had seen—or had thought he'd seen—Gwyneth urinating with gusto.

  "Gwyyyyyyyyyyyynnnnnnneth!" he shouted.

  "I'm back here," the cool, detached voice replied.

  Melvin wasn't happy. He stomped back to the bedroom she'd converted to a work room, barged right in—

  And nearly groaned at the image.

  No, Gwyneth wasn't naked now; she was fully dressed in a pistachio-green-satin see-through bra and panties.

  The impact of this image—and its suddenness—distracted Melvin as effectively as if a tree had fallen on the house at that same moment.

  Melvin began to stir quite unwillingly below the belt.

  "So what were you yelling about, Melvin?" she asked. She wasn't looking at him. Instead, she worked in an extreme focus
on the project at hand: a cruciform mosaic on a shield-shaped veneered wooden plaque. On the table before her lay assorted tools: tweezers, a small hammer, a magnifying glass, assorted files and squares of emery cloth, assorted tubes of glue, laquer, and epoxy, and a hand-held electric grinder with a conical grinding stone on its end. The tools, evidently, of her trade. A stinky clove cigarette burned in an ashtray, next to which stood a bottle of Hershey's.

  "Huh?" she said.

  Melvin blinked, those green-satin-covered tits standing out on her chest like monuments. "What?"

  Finally she looked up, exasperated. "Melvin! Stop being a space cadet! A minute ago you shouted my name at the top of your lungs. Is something wrong?"

  This was useless. Now his instincts were forcing him to gaze at her bare legs, crossed at the ankles, under the table. "Oh, yeah," he finally managed, covering his crotch with his hands. "Did you dig that hole in the back yard?"

  The question begged sarcasm. "No, Melvin. It was the good fairies who dug the hole. They were looking for the Leprechaun's gold."

  Jeez. "Well, you tracked the dirt back into the house. The guy who rented us this place is my boss's brother. If the house if a mess when we leave, I could get in trouble."

  Her bare, creamy shoulders shrugged. "It won't be a mess when we leave, because you'll clean it up."

  "Oh, that's fair. You dig the hole and track dirt through the house, and I clean it up."

  Gwyneth finally stopped what she was doing and looked at him. Sternly. "Melvin. You know I'm here as a favor to you. Your father knows that this article you're writing about houses in upstate New York is important, but he also knows that you're not capable of being on your own for too long—"