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Two
It wasn’t long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to you?
The cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you’re sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn’t gone just a little bit wrong?
The question wasn’t academic. As far as he could figure, there were only two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he wasn’t willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in this house.
Something scary. Something strange.
He shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter, garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done the dishes himself the night he went to Tony’s: it must have been his memory playing a trick on him.
These were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to “T.O.”—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the customer to the finance people. (“Which is where the real money’s made,” the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)
The lot was a new/used operation down along the flat stretch of Commercial Road between Belltower and the suburban malls. Tom sometimes thought of it as a paved farm field where a crop of scrap metal had sprouted but not ripened—everything was still sleek and new. The weather turned hot on Wednesday; the days were long, the customers sparse. Tom drank Cokes from sweating bottles and studied his system manual in the sales lounge. Most of the salesmen took breaks at a bar called Healy’s up the road, but they were a fairly hard-drinking crowd and Tom wasn’t comfortable with that yet. Lunchtimes, he scuffed across the blistering asphalt to a little steak and burger restaurant called The Paradise. He was conserving his money. He might make a respectable income on commissions in an average month, Klein assured him—assuming he started selling soon. But it was a grindingly slow month. Evenings he drove inland through the dense, ancient pine forest and thought about the mystery of the house. Or tried not to.
Two possibilities, his mind kept whispering.
You’re insane.
Or you’re not alone here.
Thursday night, he put three greasy china plates on the counter next to the stainless steel sink and went to bed.
In the morning the dishes were precisely where he had left them—as smooth and clean as optical lenses.
Friday night, he dirtied and abandoned the same three plates. Then he moved into the living room, tuned in the eleven o’clock news and installed himself on the sofa. He left the lights on in both rooms. If he moved his head a few degrees to the right he had a good view of the kitchen counter. Any motion would register in his peripheral vision.
This was scientific, Tom reassured himself. An experiment.
He was pleased with himself for approaching the problem objectively. In a way, it was almost exciting—staying up late waiting for something impossible to happen. He propped his feet on the coffee table and sprang the tab on a soda can.
Half an hour later he was less enthusiastic. He’d been keeping early hours; it was hard not to nod off during commercial breaks. He dozed a moment, sat upright and shot a glance into the kitchen. Nothing had changed.
(Well, what had he expected? Gnomes in Robin Hood hats humming “Whistle While You Work”? Or maybe—some perverse fraction of his mind insisted—creatures like rats. With clackety claws and saucer eyes.)
The “Tonight” show was less than engaging, but he wasn’t stuck with Carson: the local cable company had hooked him up last week. He abused the remote control until it yielded an antique science fiction film: Them, featuring James Whitmore and giant ants in the Mojave. In the movies radiation produced big bugs; in the neighborhood of failed fission reactors it mainly caused cancer and leukemia—the difference, Barbara had once observed, between Art and Life. He was nodding off again by the time the ants took refuge in the storm drains of Los Angeles. He stood up, walked to the kitchen— where nothing had changed—and fixed himself a cup of coffee. Now, mysteriously, it felt late: no traffic down the Post Road, a full moon hanging over the back yard. He carried his coffee into the living room. It occurred to him that this was a fairly spooky activity he had selected here: making odds on his own sanity, sometime after midnight. He had done things like this—well, things this reminded him of—when he was twelve years old, sleeping in the back yard with a flashlight or staying up with the monster flicks all by himself. Except that by now he would have given up and found some reassuring place to spend the night.
Here, there was only the house. Probably safe. Hardly reassuring.
He found an all-night Seattle station showing sitcom reruns. He propped himself up on the sofa, drained the coffee, and hoped the caffeine would help keep him awake. It did, or at least it put him on edge. Edgy, he remembered what he had come to think of as his father’s credo: The world is a cold, thoughtless place and it has no special love for human beings. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should go to bed, let the elves wash up, wake up bright and early and put the house back on the market. No law required him to become the Jacques Cousteau of the supernatural. That wasn’t what he’d signed up for.
But maybe there was nothing supernatural about it. Something odd but entirely explainable might be at work. Some kind of bacteria. Insects (nonmutated). Anything. If he had to bet, that’s where he’d put his money.
It was just that he wanted to know—really know.
He stretched out on the sofa. He meant to rest his head against the padded arm. He had no intention of going to sleep.
He closed his eyes and began to dream.
This time, the dream came without preamble.
In the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and raised the sash.
The moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a curious sinewy motion— but there was no wind; and Tom understood that it wasn’t the grass moving, it was something in the grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn’t look away or leave the window … somehow, that choice had been taken from him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they pronounced his name —Tom Winter—somehow inside his head, a voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.
The TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said 3:45.
In the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.
He slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back of his business card. “You wanted me to get in touch if I noticed anything strange.”