Bumper Crop (9 page)

A shape loomed in the headlights. Harry slammed his foot on the brakes and screeched the tires sharply.

An elderly, balding man ambled around to Harry's side of the car and stuck his face through the open window.

"
Lem
!" Harry said. "You trying to commit suicide?"

"No, I was fixing to go over there and burn that damned house down."

"You too,
Lem
?"

"Me too. Saw you cruising around looking. Figured you'd figured what I'd figured."

Harry looked at
Lem
cautiously. "And what have we figured?"

"That damned old house isn't up to any good, and that something's got to be done about it before the whole neighborhood turns to ruins."

"You've noticed how the houses look?"

"Any fool with eyes in his head and a pair of glasses can see what's going on."

"But why?"

"Who gives a damn why, let's just do something. I got some matches here, and a can of lighter fluid in my coat pocket—"

"
Lem
, we can't just commit arson. Look, get in. I don't like sitting here in the street."

Lem
turned to look at the house. They were almost even with it. "Neither do I. That thing gives me the creeps."

Lem
went around and got in. Harry drove up the block, parked at the far end where the street intersected another.
Lem
got out his pipe and packed it, filled the Ford with the smell of cinnamon.

"You're gonna get cancer yet," Harry said.

"Being as I'm ninety, it'll have to work fast."

Harry gnashed his bicuspids again. There was a certain logic in that, and just a month ago Edith had talked him into giving up his cigars for health reasons.

After a moment
Lem
produced a flask from his coat pocket, unscrewed the lid and removed the pipe from his mouth. "Cheers."

Harry sniffed. "Is that whiskey?"

"Prune juice."
Lem
smiled slyly.

"I bet."

Lem
tossed a shot down his throat. "
Wheee
," he said, lifting the bottle away from his face. "That'll put lead in your pencil!"

"Let me have a snort of that."

Harry drank, gave the flask back to
Lem
who capped it, returned it to his pocket and put his pipe back into his face.

Unconsciously, they had both turned in their seats to look out the back window of the Ford, so they could see the house. Harry thought that the high-peaked roof looked a lot like a witch's hat there in the moonlight.

"Bright night,"
Lem
said. "Holy Christ, Harry."

"I see it, I see it."

The old house trembled, moved.

It turned its head
. No other image could possibly come to mind. The house was flexible, and now its two upstairs windows were no longer facing across the street, they were looking down the street, toward Harry and
Lem
. Then the head turned again, looked in the other direction, like a cautious pedestrian about to step out into a traffic zone. The turning of its head sounded like the creaking of an old tree in a high wind.

"God," Harry said.

The house stood, revealed thick, peasant girl legs and feet beneath its firm, wooden skirt, and then it stepped from the lot and began crossing the street. As it went, a window on either side of the house went up, and two spindly arms appeared as if suddenly poked through short shirt sleeves. The arms and hands were not as thick as the legs and feet; the hands were nearly flat, the fingers like gnarled oak branches.

"It's heading for my house," Harry said.

"Shut up!"
Lem
said. "You're talking too loud."

"Edith!"

"Edith's all right,"
Lem
said. "
Betcha
a dog to a doughnut it's the house it wants. Watch!"

The house's rubbery front porch lips curled back and the front door opened to reveal rows of long, hollow, wood-screw teeth. With a creak it bent to nestle its mouth against the apex of Harry's roof, to latch its teeth there like a leech attaching itself to a swimmer's leg. And then came the low, soft sucking sounds, like gentle winds moaning against your roof at night; a sound you hear in your dreams and you almost wake, but from the back of your head comes a little hypnotic voice saying: "Sleep. It's only the wind crying, touching your roof, passing on," and so you sleep.

A shingle fell from Harry's house, caught a breeze and glided into the street. The front porch sagged ever so slightly. There was the soft sound of snapping wood from somewhere deep within. The windows grew darker and the glass rattled frightened in its frames.

After what seemed an eternity, but could only have been moments, the thing lifted its grotesque head and something dark and fluid dripped from its mouth, dribbled down the roof of Harry's house and splashed in the yard. Then there was a sound from the Gothic beast, a sound like a rattlesnake clacking, a sort of contented laughter from deep in its chest.

The house turned on its silly feet, crept and creaked, arms swinging, back across the street, turned to face Harry's house, then like a tired man home from work, it settled sighing into its place once more. The two upper story windows grew dark, as if thick lids had closed over them. The front porch lips smacked once, then there was silence and no movement.

Harry turned to
Lem
, who had replaced the pipe with the whiskey flask. The whiskey gurgled loudly in the cool fall night. "Did you see . . . ?"

"Of course I did,"
Lem
said, lowering the flask, wiping a sleeve across his mouth.

"Can't be."

"Somehow it is."

"But how?"

Lem
shook his head. "Maybe it's like those science fiction books I read, like something out of them, an alien, or worse yet, something that has always been among us but has gone undetected for the most part.

"Say it's some kind of great space beast that landed here on Earth, a kind of chameleon that can camouflage itself by looking like a house. Perhaps it's some kind of vampire. Only it isn't blood it wants, but the energy out of houses."

Lem
tipped up his flask again. "Houses haven't got energy."

Lem
lowered the flask. "They've got their own special kind of energy. Listen: houses are built for the most part—least these houses were—by people who love them, people who wanted good solid homes. They were built before those soulless glass and plastic
turd mounds that dot the skyline, before contractors were throwing dirt into the foundation instead of gravel, before they were pocketing the money that should have gone on good studs, two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. And these houses, the ones built with hope and love, absorbed these sensations, and what is hope and love but a kind of energy? You with me, Harry?"

"I guess, but . . . oh, rave on."

"So the walls of these houses took in that love and held it, and maybe that love, that energy, became the pulse, the heartbeat of the house. See what I'm getting at, Harry?

"Who appreciates and loves their homes more than folks our age, people who were alive when folks cared about what they built, people, who in their old age, find themselves more home-ridden, more dependent upon those four walls, more grateful of anything that keeps out the craziness of this newer world, keeps out the wind and the rain and the sun and those who would do us harm?

"This thing, maybe it can smell out, sense the houses that hold the most energy, and along it comes in the dead of night and it settles in and starts to draw the life out of them, like a vampire sucking out a victim's blood, and where the vampire's victims get weak and sag and grow pale, our houses do much the same. Because, you see, Harry, they have become living things. Not living in the way we normally think of it, but in a sort of silent, watchful way."

Harry blinked several times. "But why did it take the form of a Gothic-type house, why not a simple frame?"

"Maybe the last houses it was among looked a lot like that, and when it finished it came here. And to it these houses look basically the same as all the others. You see, Harry, it's not impersonating our houses, it's impersonating a house."

"That's wild,
Lem
."

"And the more I drink from this flask, the wilder I'll get. Take this for instance: it could look like anything. Consider all the ghettos in the world, the slums, the places that no amount of Federal Aid, money, and repair seem to fix. Perhaps these chameleons, or whatever you want to call them, live there as well—because despair fills walls as much as love—and they become the top floors of rundown tenement houses, the shanties alongside other shanties on Louisiana rivers—"

"And they feed on this love or despair, this energy?"

"Exactly, and when it's sucked out, the houses die and the creatures move on."

"What are we going to do about it?"

Lem
turned up the flask and swigged. When he lowered it, he said, "
Something
, that's for sure."

T
hey left the car, cat-pawed across the street, crept through backyards toward the sleeping house. When they were almost to the lot where the house squatted, they stopped beneath a sycamore tree and wore its shadow. They passed the flask back and forth.

Way out beyond the suburbs, in the brain of the city, they could hear traffic sounds. And much closer, from the ship channel, came the forlorn hoot of a plodding tug.

"Now what?" Harry asked.

"We sneak up on it from the rear, around by the back door—"

"Back door! If the front door is its mouth,
Lem
, the back door must be its—"

"We're not going inside, we're going to snoop, stupid, then we're going to do something."

"Like what?"

"We'll cross that blazing
tightwire
when we get to it. Now move!"

They moved, came to the back door.
Lem
reached out to touch the doorknob. "How about this?" he whispered. "No knob, just a black spot that looks like one. From a distance—hell, up close—you couldn't tell it was a fake without touching. Come on, let's look in the windows."

"Windows?" Harry said, but
Lem
had already moved around the edge of the house, and when Harry caught up with him, he was stooping at one of the windows, looking in.

"This is crazy,"
Lem
said. "There's a stairway and furniture and cobwebs even . . . No, wait a minute. Feel!"

Harry crept up beside him, reluctantly touched the window. It was most certainly not glass, and it was not transparent either. It was cold and hard like the scale of a fish.

"It's just an illusion, like the doorknob," Harry said.

"Only a more complicated type of illusion, something it does with its mind probably. There's no furniture, no stairs, no nothing inside there but some kind of guts, I guess, the juice of our houses."

The house shivered, sent vibrations up Harry's palm. Harry remembered those long arms that had come out of the side windows earlier. He envisioned one popping out now, plucking him up.

The house burped, loudly.

Suddenly
Lem
was wearing Harry for a hat.

"Get down off me,"
Lem
said, "or you're going to wake up with a tube up your nose."

Harry climbed down. "It's too much for us,
Lem
. In the movies they'd bring in the army, use nukes."

Lem
took the can of lighter fluid out of his coat pocket. It was the large economy size.

"
Ssssshhhh
,"
Lem
said. He brought out his pocket knife and a book of matches.

"You're going to blow us up!"

Lem
tore the lining out of one of his coat pockets, squirted lighter fluid on it, poked one end of the lining into the fluid can with the point of his knife. He put the rag-stuffed can on the ground, the matches beside it. Then he took his knife, stuck it quickly into the house's side, ripped down.

Something black and odorous oozed out. The house trembled. "That's like a mosquito bite to this thing,"
Lem
said. "Give me that can and matches."

"I don't like this," Harry said, but he handed the can and matches to
Lem
.
Lem
stuck the can halfway into the wound, let the rag dangle.

"Now run like hell,"
Lem
said, and struck a match.

Harry started running toward the street as fast as his arthritic legs would carry him.

Lem
lit the pocket lining. The fluid-soaked cloth jumped to bright life.

Lem
turned to run. He hadn't gone three steps when the
can
blew. The heat slapped his back and the explosion thundered inside his head. He reached the street, looked back.