The Barrens & Others Read online

  When they returned to the table, Howard refilled their tall, slim champagne glasses from the bottle in the bucket. He watched a fly buzz angrily against the window that ran alongside their table. Outside at the marina, the boats rocked gently at their moorings. He savored the peace.

  "You're awful quiet, Howie," Lydia said after a moment.

  "Am I?"

  "Compared to this morning, you're a sphinx."

  Howard didn't know what to tell her, how to say it. Maybe the best thing to do was to lay it all out. Maybe she could help him sort it out.

  "I think I'm having second thoughts about this special 'empathy' I've developed," he said finally. "Maybe it really is a curse. I seem to be getting increasingly sensitive. I mean, as I walked over here I got rushes of feelings from everyone I passed. There was this little kid crying on the corner. He had lost his mom and I found myself – me – utterly terrified. I couldn't move, I was so scared. Thank God his mother found him just then or I don't know what I'd have done. And when she whacked him on the backside for running off, I felt it. It hurt! The kid was the worst, but I was picking up all sorts of conflicting emotions. It was almost a relief to get in here. Good thing we're so early and it's almost deserted."

  "Why'd you have our table moved? To get away from that fat guy?"

  Howard nodded. "Yeah. He must have stuffed himself from the buffet. I thought my stomach was going to burst. I couldn't enjoy my dinner feeling like that. And if he's going to have a gallbladder attack, I don't want to be near him."

  The fly's buzzing continued. It was beginning to annoy him.

  "Howard," Lydia said, looking at him intently. She only called him Howard when she was mad or really serious about something. "Can this really be happening?"

  "Don't you think I've asked myself that a thousand times since last night? But yes, it's real, and it's happening to me."

  He signaled their waiter as he passed. "Could you do something about that fly?"

  "Of course."

  The waiter returned in a moment with a fly swatter. He swung it as Howard was pouring more champagne.

  Pain like Howard had never known in his life flashed through his entire body as his ears roared and his vision went stark white. It was gone in an instant, over as soon as it had begun.

  "My God, Howard, what's the matter!"

  Lydia was staring at him, wide-eyed and ashen-faced. He glanced around. So were the other people in the place. He felt their disapproval, their annoyance. The waiter began sopping up the champagne he had spilled when he had dropped the bottle.

  "Wh-what happened?"

  "You screamed and spasmed like you were having a seizure! Howard, what's wrong with you?"

  "When he swatted that fly," he said, nodding his head in the direction of the retreating waiter, "I...I think I felt it."

  Her disbelief stung him. "Oh, Howard–"

  "It's true, Sis. It hurt so much for that one tiny second there I thought I was going to die."

  "But a fly, Howard? A fly?" She stared at him. "What's wrong?"

  Suddenly he was very hot. Terribly hot. His skin felt like it was on fire. He looked down at his bare arms and watched the skin turn red, rise up in blisters, burst open. He felt as if he were being boiled alive.

  ...boiled...

  His lobster! The kitchen was only a few feet away. They'd be cooking it now – dropping it live into a pot of boiling water!

  Screaming with the pain, he leaped up from the table and ran for the door.

  Outside...coolness. He leaned against the outer wall of Memison's, gasping and sweating, oblivious to the stares of the passers-by but too well aware of their curiosity.

  "Howard, are you going crazy?" It was Lydia. She had followed him out.

  "Didn't you see me? I was burning up in there!" He looked down at his arms. The skin was perfect, unblemished.

  "All I saw was my brother acting like a crazy man!"

  He felt her concern, her fear for him, and her embarrassment because of him.

  "When they started boiling my lobster, they started boiling me! I could feel myself being boiled alive!"

  "Howard, this has got to stop!"

  "Damn right it does." He pushed himself off the wall and began walking down the street, back toward his condo. "I've got some thinking to do. See you."

  *

  Lydia was having her first cup of coffee when Howard called the next morning.

  "Can I come over, Sis?" His voice was hoarse, strained. "I've got to get out of here."

  "Sure, Howie. Is it the arm again?"

  "Yeah! Feels like it's being crushed!"

  Crushed. That rang a bell somewhere in the back of her mind. "Come right over. I'll leave the door unlocked. If I'm not here, make yourself at home. I'll be back soon. I've got an errand to run."

  She hung up, pulled on jeans and a blouse, and hurried down to the Monroe Public Library. A crushed arm...she rememebred something about that, something to do with the Soundview Condos.

  It took her awhile, but she finally tracked it down in a microfilm spool of the Monroe Express from two years ago last summer...

  *

  Howard looked like hell. He looked distracted. He wasn't paying attention.

  "Listen to me, Howard! It happened two years ago! They were pouring the basement slab in your section of condos. As the cement truck was backing up, a construction worker slipped in some mud and the truck's rear wheels rolled right over his arm. Crushed it so bad even Columbia Presbyterian couldn't save it."

  He looked at her dully. "So?"

  "So don't you see? You're not just tuned in to the feelings and sensations of people and even lobsters and bugs around you. You're picking up the residuals of old pains and hurts."

  "Is that why it's so noisy in here?"

  "'Noisey'?"

  "Yeah. Emotional noise. This place is crowded, I mean jammed with emotions, some faint, some strong, some up, some down, some really mean ones. So confusing."

  Lydia remembered that these garden apartments had been put up shortly after the war – World War II. If Howard could actually feel forty-plus years of emotion –

  "I wish they'd go away and let me sleep. I'd give anything for just a moment's peace."

  Lydia went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and found the bottle of Valium her doctor had prescribed for her when she was divorcing Harry. She shook two of the yellow tablets into her palm and gave them to Howard with a cup of water.

  "Take these and go lie down on my bed. They'll help you sleep."

  He did as he was told and shuffled off to the next room, moving like a zombie. Lydia's heart went out to him. She called a friend and begged her to take the steno job she had lined up for this afternoon, then settled down to watch over her big brother.

  He slept fitfully through the day. Around dark she took a shower to ease her tension-knotted muscles. It helped some. Wrapped in her terrycloth robe, she returned to the kitchen and found him standing there looking worse than ever.

  "I can't stand it!" he said in a voice that sounded as if it were going to break into a million jagged pieces. "It's making me crazy. It's even in my dreams! All those feelings! I'm going nuts!"

  His wild eyes frightened her. "Just calm down, Howie. I'll make you something to eat and then we can–"

  "I've gotta get outta here! I can't take it any longer!"

  He started for the door. Lydia tried to stop him.

  "Howard–!"

  He pushed her aside. "Got to get out!"

  By the time she threw on enough clothing to follow him, he was nowhere to be seen.

  *

  The night was alive with fear and joy and lust and pain and pleasure and love, emotionally and physically strobing Howard with heat and light. He needed relief, he needed quiet, he needed peace.

  And there, up ahead, he saw it... a cool and dark place... almost empty of emotions, of feelings of any sort.

  He headed for it.

  *

  She got th
e call the next morning.

  "Are you Lydia Chambers, sister of Howard Weinstein?" said an official sounding voice.

  Oh, God!

  "Yes."

  "Would you come down to the Crosby Marina, please, m'am?".

  "Oh, no! He's not–"

  "He's okay," the voice said quickly. "Physically, at least."

  *

  Lt. Donaldson drove her out to the buoy in a Marine Police outboard. Howard sat in a rowboat tied to the bobbing red channel marker in the center of Monroe Harbor.

  "Seems he stole the boat last night," said the lieutenant, who had curly blond hair and looked to be in his mid-thirties. "But he seems to have gone off the deep end. He won't untie from the buoy and he starts screaming and swinging an oar at anyone who comes near. He asked for you."

  He cut the engine and let the outboard drift toward Howard and the rowboat.

  "Tell them to leave me alone, Sis!" Howard said when they got to within a couple of dozen feet of him.

  He looked wild – unshaven, his clothes smudged and wrinkled, his hair standing up at crazy angles. And in his eyes, a dangerous, cornered look.

  He looks insane, she thought.

  "Come ashore, Howard," she said, trying to exude friendliness and calm confidence. "Come home now."

  "I can't, Sis! You can explain it to them. Make them understand. This is the only place where it's quiet, where I can find peace. Oh, I know the fish are eating and being eaten below, but it's sporadic and it's far away and I can handle that. I just can't be in town anymore!"

  Lt. Donaldson whispered out of the side of his mouth. "He's been talking crazy like that since we found him out here this morning."

  Lydia wondered what she could tell the lieutenant: That her brother wasn't crazy, that he was suffering from a curse? Start talking like that and they'd be measuring her for a straitjacket, too.

  "You can't stay out here, Howard."

  "I have to. There's a gull's nest in the buoy and the little birds were hungry this morning and it made me hungry, too. But then the mother came and fed them and now their bellies are full and they're content"... he began to sob... "and so am I and I just want to stay here near them where it's quiet and peaceful."

  She heard the lieutenant growl. "All right. That does it!"

  He stood up and signaled to shore. Another larger boat roared out from the marina. There were men in white jackets aboard, and they were carrying something that looked like a net.

  *

  "He'll be asleep for awhile yet, Mrs. Chambers," said Dr. Gold. "We had to inject him with a pretty stiff dose of Thorazine to quiet him down."

  It had been horrifying to watch them throw a net over her own brother and haul him into the bigger boat like a giant fish, but there had been no other way. Howard would have died out on the water if they had left him there.

  She had spent most of the morning signing papers and answering countless questions on Howard's medical and emotional history, family history, current stresses and strains. She had told Dr. Gold everything, including Howard's receiving the hand in the mail two days ago. God, was it only two days ago? Everything...except the part about feeling the pain and emotions of other people...and animals and even insects. She couldn't bring herself to risk trying to explain that to Dr. Gold. He might think she was sharing her brother's psychosis.

  "When can he leave?" she asked.

  "Not for twenty-eight days at least. That's how long he's committed. Don't worry too much. This appears to be an acute psychosis precipitated by that grisly incident with the severed hand. We'll start his psychotherapy immediately, find an appropriate medication, and do what we can to get him on his psychological feet again as soon as possible. I think he'll do just fine."

  Lydia wasn't too sure of that, but all she could do was hope. At least the Monroe Neuropsychiatric Institute was brand new. It had opened only last winter. She had heard about it, but since she never came to this part of town, she hadn't seen it until now. It seemed pleasant enough. And since most of the patients here were probably sedated to some degree, their emotions wouldn't be too strong. Maybe Howard had a chance here.

  Dr. Gold walked her to the door.

  "In a way it's sort of ironic that your brother should wind up here."

  "Why is that?"

  "Well, he's one of the limited partners that developed this little hospital. All of the limited partners got a certified historic rehabilitation tax credit for investing, one of the few goodies remaining after tax overhaul."

  "Rehabilitation?" A warning bell sounded in a far corner of her mind. "You mean it isn't a new building?"

  "Oh, my goodness, no. We've cleaned it up to look spanking new, but in reality it's a hundred and fifty years old."

  "A hundred and fifty–!"

  "Yes. It was abandoned for such a long time. I understand it was being used for dogfights before we took it over. Even used it as a place to train young fighting pit bulls. Trained them with kittens. A sick, sick–" He stared at her. "Are you all right?"

  "Dog fights?" Oh, God, what would that do to Howard? Wouldn't the residual from something like that send him right up the wall?

  "I'm sorry if I upset you."

  "I'm okay," she said, steeling herself to ask the next question. "What was the building originally?"

  "Originally? Why I thought everybody knew that, but I guess you're too young to remember. Up until the early 1960s it was the Monroe Slaughterhouse. One of the busiest in the–"

  He stopped as the sound came down the hall – a long, hoarse, agonized scream that echoed off the freshly painted walls and tore into Lydia's soul.

  Howard was awake.

  foreword to "Tenants"

  The idea for "Tenants" had been wandering through the back of my mind for years. A simple little story about an escaped killer who thinks he's found the perfect hideout from the law in a remote house at the end of a road through a salt marsh. The old coot who lives there is crazy: He keeps talking about his tenants, but he's alone in the shack. Or is he?

  I could have set it anywhere, but I chose Monroe – not only because I'd set "Feelings" there, but because I was squeezing out these stories while writing Reborn, also set in Monroe, and I saw a connection. I'd envisioned Reborn of as the first part of a long roman fleuve that would unite The Keep, The Tomb, and The Touch. Why were all these strange things happening in Monroe? But why were all these strange things happening in Monroe? Why had the Dat tay vao been drawn to Monroe in The Touch? Was it all random, or was there a reason? I realized Reborn contained that reason. So if the old guy in "Tenants" has some strange boarders, maybe they too wound up in Monroe for a reason. The locale had no direct effect on the novelette itself, but it gave me a little extra kick to know I was connecting it to the cycle.

  Gus and his tenants appear again briefly in Nightworld.

  Tenants

  The mail truck was coming.

  Gilroy Connors, shoes full of water and shirt still wet from the morning's heavy dew, crouched in the tall grass and punk-topped reeds. He ached all over; his thighs particularly were cramped from holding his present position. But he didn't dare move for fear of giving his presence away.

  So he stayed hunkered down across the road from the battered old shack that looked deserted but wasn't – there had been lights on in the place last night. With its single pitched roof and rotting cedar shake siding, it looked more like an overgrown outhouse that a home. A peeling propane tank squatted on the north side; a crumbling brick chimney supported a canted TV antenna. Beyond the shack, glittering in the morning sunlight, lay the northeast end of Monroe Harbor and the Long Island Sound. The place gave new meaning to the word isolated. As if a few lifetimes ago someone had brought a couple of tandems of fill out to the end of the hard-packed dirt road, dumped them, and built a shack. Except for a rickety old dock with a sodden rowboat tethered to it, there was not another structure in sight in either direction. Only a slender umbilical cord of insulated wire connected it to the re
st of the world via a long column of utility poles marching out from town. All around was empty marsh.

  Yeah. Isolated as all hell.

  It was perfect.

  As Gil watched, the shack's front door opened and a grizzled old man stumbled out, a cigarette in his mouth and a fistful of envelopes in his hand. Tall and lanky with an unruly shock of gray hair standing off his head, he scratched his slightly protruding belly as he squinted in the morning sunlight. He wore a torn undershirt that had probably been white once and a pair of faded green work pants held up by suspenders, He looked as rundown as his home, and as much in need of a shave and a bath as Gil felt. With timing so perfect that it could only be the result of daily practice, the old guy reached the mailbox at exactly the same time as the white jeep-like mail truck.

  Must have been watching from the window.

  Not an encouraging thought. Had the old guy seen Gil out here? If he had, he gave no sign. Which meant Gil was still safe.

  He fingered the handle of the knife inside his shirt.

  Lucky for him.

  While the old guy and the mailman jawed, Gil studied the shack again. The place was a sign that his recent run of good luck hadn't deserted him yet. He had come out to the marshes to hide until things cooled down in and around Monroe and had been expecting to spend a few real uncomfortable nights out here. The shack would make things a lot easier.

  Not much of a place. At most it looked big enough for two rooms and no more. Barely enough space for an ancient couple who didn't move around much – who ate, slept, crapped, watched TV and nothing more. Hopefully, it wasn't a couple. Just the old guy. That would make it simple. A wife, even a real sickly one, could complicate matters.

  Gil wanted to know how many were living there before he invited himself in. Not that it would matter much. Either way, he was going in and staying for a while. He just liked to know what he was getting into before he made his move.

  One thing was sure: He wasn't going to find any money in there. The old guy had to be next to destitute. But even ten bucks would have made him richer than Gil. He looked at the rusting blue late-sixties Ford Torino with the peeling vinyl roof and hoped it would run. But of course it ran. The old guy had to get into town to cash his Social Security check and buy groceries, didn't he?