999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [118]
For those of you with your heads so firmly stuck in the sand of the horror/suspense field that you’re not aware of his work, since winning science fiction’s Phillip K. Dick Memorial Award for his novel The Anubis Gates (which describes seventeenth-century England in minute detail), Powers has been considered one of the most important voices in the sf and fantasy fields; his work (other novels: Earthquake Weather, Last Call, Expiration Date) exhibits his own brand of “magic realism” combining elements of sf, fantasy, horror, the occult, psychiatry, surrealism, comedy, history, and just about anything else he feels like throwing into the brew—with magical results.
As you re about to see, we’re lucky to have him.
The day before the Santa Ana place blew up, the telephone rang at about noon. I had just walked the three blocks back from Togo’s with a tuna-fish sandwich, and when I was still out in the yard I heard the phone ringing through the open window; I ran up the porch steps, trying to fumble my keys out of my pocket without dropping the Togo’s bag, and I was panting when I snatched up the receiver in the living room. “Hello?”
I thought I could hear a hissing at the other end, but no voice. It was October, with the hot Santa Ana winds shaking the dry pods off the carob trees, and the receiver was already slick with my sweat. I used to sweat a lot in those days, what with the beer and the stress and all. “Hello?” I said again, impatiently. “Am I talking to a short circuit?” Sometimes my number used to get automatic phone calls from an old abandoned oil tank in San Pedro, and I thought I had rushed in just to get another of those.
It was a whisper that finally answered me, very hoarse; but I could tell it was a man: “Gunther! Jesus, boy—this is—Doug Olney, from Neff High School! You remember me, don’t you?”
“Doug? Olney?” I wondered if he had had throat cancer. It had been nearly twenty years since I’d spoken to him. “Sure I remember! Where are you? Are you in town—”
“No time to talk. I don’t want to—change any of your plans.” He seemed to be upset. “Listen, a woman’s gonna call your number in a minute; she’s gonna ask for me. You don’t know her. Say I just left a minute ago, okay?”
“Who is she—” I began, but he had already hung up.
As soon as I lowered the receiver into the cradle, the phone rang again. I took a deep breath and then picked it up again. “Hello?”
It was a woman, sure enough, and she said, “Is Doug Olney there?” I remember thinking that she sounded like my sister, who’s married, in a common-law and probably unconsummated sense, to an Iranian who lives at De Gaulle Airport in France; though I hadn’t heard from my sister since Carter was president.
I took a deep breath. “He just left,” I said helplessly.
“I bet.” A shivering sigh came over the line. “But I can’t do any more.” Again I was holding a dead phone.
We grew up in a big old Victorian house on Lafayette Avenue in Buffalo. The third floor had no interior partitions or walls, since it was originally designed to be a ballroom; by the time we were living there the days of balls were long gone, and that whole floor was jammed to capacity with antique furniture, wall to wall, floor to twelve-foot ceiling, back to front. My sister and I were little kids then, and we could crawl all through that vast lightless volume, up one canted couch and across the underside of an inverted table, squeezing past rolled carpets and worming between Regency chair legs. Of course there was no light at all unless we crowded into a space near one of the dust-filmed windows; and climbing back down to the floor, and then tracing the molding and the direction of the floor planks to the door, was a challenge. When we were finally able to stand up straight again out in the hall, we’d be covered with sour dust and not eager to explore in there again soon.
The nightmare I always had as a child was