FOURTEEN
THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED
Ah, the classic Japanese luxury marque,” the bottle blond attendant sneered as Kendall described his car. The attendant returned in two minutes, pulling up at the front door with a chirp of the tires. Kendall tipped him a buck. Dude stared at it and smiled. Cheap tip for a cheap car.
Kendall got in the car and turned the radio on to WAVE. The Trade Winds’s “New York’s A Lonely Town” poured like honey from the speakers. Clipped to the sun visor in a CD package were Pet Sounds, The Best of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, Explorers Club’s Freedom Wind, and Sunrise Highway. Kendall had taken their advice and followed the sun to the Promised Land, California, the American dream. Land of milk and honey, nuts and fruits, Bikini Beach and Sheryl Crow.
Kendall drove down Mulholland, the boulevard of dreams. Or broken dreams. Attending a party in Erroll Flynn’s house. He wished his folks could see him now. They’d probably laugh at him for hobnobbing with the glitterati. He couldn’t remember his folks ever going to the movies. They never were keen on the arts. His dad wanted him to become a lawyer. His mother wanted him to become a doctor. As if. Kendall was not analytical. He was imaginative. He always knew he would someday make his living off his imagination. The first time he picked up a comic book it smacked him between the eyes like a dum-dum bullet. Way of the Rat. The intricate, accurate drawings of hand-to-hand combat blew his mind, and in that instant, he knew he had found his calling.
Fortunately, he had a talent for drawing; had studied, practised, and polished until he was one of the best comic book illustrators in the country. Him and 2000 other guys.
Kendall had been at Nate’s party for ninety minutes, had had no significant conversations, met no one except poor Sue and Jennifer, whose number he had. Good deal. Kendall needed a girlfriend, not necessarily a wife. Although, Shirley had put it succinctly; we marry, or I’m outta here. Kendall figured that’s the way a lot of marriages happened. He had bad luck with women. He had a knack for choosing vulnerable-looking dames who turned out to be succubi. Before Shirley, there had been a long string of mostly good-looking women addicted to alcohol, painkillers, meth, blow, smack, nose spray, and chocolate. He had no one but himself to blame. He wished he had all the money back that he’d spent on blow in the nineties.
Oh well.
He pulled up in front of the garage, got out, and opened the door. It wasn’t until he got back into his car and turned into the garage that he realized the Corvette was now all the way back at the workbench. Funny. He was sure he’d left it in gear, and the floor was level. He parked his car, got out, and went up to the Vette. He sat in the seat and grabbed the shift. Neutral. He must have been mistaken. Maybe they’d had an earthquake. With a glance at the sealed door to the basement, he went outside, shut the garage door and locked it, and went up the steps to his front door. He would have to get that basement door open which meant he had to go into the basement. It could wait.
Kendall walked through the long dark house feeling like a watchman at a museum. He went all the way to the back and looked out through the pyramidal arch at the city lights in the distance. A million-dollar view if you liked that sort of thing. Kendall stood in the arch with one hand on each pillar. Samson. It was a million-dollar view, but he was no millionaire; not after purchasing this house. But what a house. He still felt as if he were wandering through a dream. Him! Kendall Coffin; owner of a Roark Dexter Smith house. It was a dream come true.
Like most professional nerds, Kendall was his enthusiasms. He was a creature of pop culture for whom taste was everything. He’d softened from his college years when he used to get into fistfights over who was better, Leftover Salmon or Phish, Wolverine or Batman, Porsche or BMW.
The house itself was the ultimate collection. He could reap a small fortune selling the abandoned items on eBay. It puzzled him that he’d acquired it so easily. Very rarely did a Smith house come on the market.
He circled the house clockwise until he came to the master bedroom, pulled off his clothes, brushed his teeth, and so to bed. He tossed and turned. Maybe he should see a sleep specialist. He’d always been a light sleeper and ten years on blow didn’t help, but after Shirley died he started sleeping better. Chalk it up to strange surroundings.
He fell into a shallow sleep. He was on a ship headed for Costa Rica, with a whole bunch of tourists, and in a vast open space surrounded by interior balconies. Kendall hated being at sea. He hated the idea of being confined to a tiny island in a sea of water, the smell of the heads, the nauseating list.
They docked. Not Costa Rica. Portugal. They were issued motorcycles. Kendall could barely keep his on the road, so he adopted an impossible position, torso truncated over the handlebars, trying to thrust his head past the forward most point of the bike. Suddenly back from the ride, staying in a dormitory owned by an anonymous state college. He went into his room and shut the door. He could hear sounds of partying going on all around him: loud music, laughter, women squealing.
A woman screaming, a twisting howl of terror and desperation that brought Kendall out of his sleep like a leaping dolphin. He sat up in bed, sweat beading on his forehead, wild-eyed. The scream echoed faintly down the corridors. Or was it a siren fading off into the distance?
It wasn’t his imagination! He could still hear the reverberation. Unless he was going mad. He froze, afraid to make a sound, and listened. The house ticked minutely. He heard the faint echo of a car alarm in the neighborhood. He debated taking one of the Xanax he’d salvaged from Shirley’s bathroom.
That was three nights in a row. One way to ascertain whether he was going mad; he could get a sound-activated recorder and set it up in the room.
Eventually, he fell asleep.