Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (8 page)

“Beth …?”

“Yeah?”

Dave stood still in the middle of the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, he suddenly realized that right now he
could
hear … something. There was a low, steady vibration, a throb just at the edge of awareness. He could feel it in his feet.

“Wait a sec.” He held up a finger to silence her. “You know … ? I think I
can
hear it.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“No … Seriously … There’s this … sound.”

Beth looked at him like she didn’t quite believe him, but then she relented and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought I was going insane.”

Over the next hour or so, they searched throughout the house from attic to basement, looking for a possible source of the sound. It wasn’t in the wires or the pipes or the circuit breaker box or the TV, of that Dave was sure. The odd thing was, no matter what floor they were on or what room they were in, the sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. When Dave went outside to check the shed and garage, he found Beth standing in the middle of the yard, crying.

“What’s the matter, honey?” He came to her and put his arms around her, feeling the steel-spring tension in her body.

“I can hear it just as loud out here as I can inside the house, “ she said, sobbing into his shoulder.

“So?”

“So … That means it’s not coming from inside the house. It’s gotta be out here somewhere. It’s like it’s coming from the ground or the sky or something.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” he said. He took a breath and, leaning close, stared into her eyes. “I’ll call the electric company and maybe the phone company. It’s gotta be a problem with the wires.”

“Sure,” Beth said, not sounding at all convinced.

“They must have equipment to, you know, locate the source.”

She forced a smile and wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve. Then, without another word, she turned and walked back into the house. Dave watched her go, knowing that she didn’t believe it was an electrical wire problem.

By the time he left for work, he wasn’t sure he believed it, either.

* * *

Over the next few days, things got worse.

A lot worse.

Like a sore in your mouth you can’t stop probing with your tongue, Dave found himself poised and listening for the sound all the time, trying to detect its source. Once he was aware of it, he couldn’t help but hear it. He was growing desperate to locate it and analyze it. His work at the office suffered. Jeff Stewart, his boss, commented on how distracted he was. At first he said with amusement on how Dave didn’t seem to be “quite there,” but that his comments changed to concern and, finally, exasperation.

But Dave couldn’t help but notice that everyone else in the office seemed to be a bit distracted, too, and as the day wore on, more and more irritable. This would make sense, he thought, if everyone was sleeping as poorly as he was. It had taken him hours to fall asleep last night, and once he was out, the noise still permeated his dreams. He woke up a dozen or more times and just lay there staring up at the ceiling as he listened to the low, steady hum just at the edge of hearing. He knew Beth was lying awake next to him, but they didn’t talk. Every attempt at conversation ended with one of them snapping at the other.

Over the next few days, more and more people began to hear the hum. Sales of white-noise machines, soundproofing materials, and environmental sound CDs went through the roof. People turned their TVs and radios up loud in a futile effort to block out the hum, further irritating their neighbors who were already on edge.

Dave’s commute to work quickly became a crash course in Type-A driving techniques. One morning, he was trapped for over an hour behind a sixty-five-car pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway that had turned into a demolition derby. It took nearly the entire city police force and an army of tow trucks to break up the melee. After that, Dave kept to backstreets going to and from work.

Schools began canceling soccer and football games as soccer-mom brawls and riots in the stands became increasingly frequent and intense. Shoving matches broke out in ticket lines and grocery checkout lanes. Neighborhood feuds and other violent incidents escalated, filling the newspaper, TV news, and internet sites with lurid reports. As the week wore on, road rage morphed into drive-by shootings. Gang warfare was waged openly, and police brutality was more often applauded than prosecuted. The slightest provocation caused near-riots in public. The media reported that the hum—and the rise in aggressive behavior—was now a global phenomenon.

“It’s only a matter of time before some third-world countries start tossing nukes at each other,” Dave muttered one morning at the office staff meeting.

Mike from Purchasing glared at him.

“Who died and made you Mr. Know-It-All, huh?” he snarled.

“Jesus, Mike, don’t be such an asshole,” Dave snapped back. “I was just—”

“All right. That’s enough,” Jeff said. “This isn’t kindergarten. Let’s try to be professional here, okay?”

“Professional, schmessional,” Mike grumbled. “Who gives a rat’s ass anymore, anyway?”

“I
said
that’s
enough
.” Jeff thumped the conference table with his clenched fist.

Sherry from Operations suddenly burst into tears.

“Stop it, stop it now! Jesus
stop it!
” she shrieked. “I can’t
take
it anymore! I can’t eat. I can’t sleep, and I sure as hell can’t stand listening to
you
morons!”

Dave noticed with a shock the fist-sized bruise on her cheek. She caught him staring at her face and, covering the bruise with her hand, shouted, “It’s
none
of your goddamned
business!
”

“Wha’d I say?” asked Dave with an innocent shrug.

“
That’s it!
” Jeff shouted. “You’re fired! All of you! Every damned one of you!”

The entire staff turned and looked at him, seated at the head of the table. His face was flushed; his eyes were bulging. In the moment of stunned silence that followed, everyone in the room became aware of the hum, but Dave was the first to mention that he thought it had changed subtly. Now he told them there was a discordant clanking sound. It was still just at the edge of hearing, but it was penetrating.

“The music of the spheres,” Sherry whispered in a tight, warbling voice. “It’s the music of the spheres.” Her voice scaled up toward hysteria. “The harmony is gone. The center cannot hold. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong!” With a loud, animal wail, she got up and ran from the room with tears streaming down her face.

Mike swallowed hard, trying to control his frustration. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

“Go on home! All of you! I’m closing the office until the authorities figure out what this sound is.” Jeff’s fists were clenched, and his body was trembling as though he were in the grips of a fever. “If I don’t, I swear to God I’ll have to kill every single one of you assholes … unless you kill me first.” He grinned wolfishly; then he slumped down in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his ears as he lowered his head and sobbed quietly.

Dave and the others left the conference room without speaking.

That afternoon, Dave drove home, mindful not to do anything that would irritate anyone on the road. Sitting on the sofa in the living room as he waited for Beth to get home, he couldn’t help but listen to the pervasive hum. He thought about what could possibly be happening but couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer.

When Beth finally came home, Dave said, “Sit down. We have to talk.”

She looked at him warily, and the mistrust he saw in her eyes hurt him.

“What’s her name?”

“What?” He realized what she meant and shook his head. “No. No. It’s nothing like that.” He took a breath. “Look, Beth, I’m trying to save us here, not break us apart. Listen to me, okay?”

Beth nodded as she took a breath and held it. He could see she was trying to pull the last shreds of her patience together, and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude and love for her. It was so good to feel something pleasant that, for a brief moment, he could forget all about that damned hum.

“Jeff closed the office today. Fired all of us.”

Beth stared at him as if she didn’t comprehend.

“This sound is getting on everyone’s nerves, and he’s afraid we’re all going to end up killing each other. He’s probably right. I was thinking—we should get out of here.”

“Get out?” The expression on her face indicated that she barely comprehended what he was saying.

“Let’s go up to your folks’ place … up in Maine … or anywhere--somewhere, just as long as it’s far away from here and all these people.”

“But the news says this hum is everywhere. All around the world. There’s no escaping it, Dave,” Beth’s face contorted with barely repressed panic, but she clenched her fists and struggled to regain her self-control. “Besides … what’s the point of going anywhere?”

“Maybe there isn’t a point, but I … I feel like we have to do
something
. We have to try. I don’t want us to end up another murder-suicide statistic.” He took her into his arms and held her close. “I love you, Beth.”

She clung to him and whispered, “And I love you.”

They sat together silently in the living room as twilight deepened, and the world all around them hummed.

* * *

What would normally have been a nine-hour ride to Little Sebago Lake took more than twenty-four hours because Dave wanted to stay off the interstates. The latest news reports indicated that truckers were chasing down and crushing unlucky drivers who pissed them off. Dave had seen the movie “Duel,” and he had no intention of reenacting it.

As they headed north into
New England, the sound became more discordant. Dave noticed a mechanical chunking quality to it that was or at least seemed to be getting more pronounced. The endless, irregular rhythm ground away at his nerves like fine sandpaper, but they finally made it to the cabin on Sebago Lake without incident.

The camp was on the east side of Sebago, small and shabby, but a welcome sight after such an ordeal. The lake stretched out before them—a flat, blue expanse of water with New Hampshire’s White Mountains far off in the distance, to the west. When they arrived, the sun was setting. It tipped the lake’s surface with sparkles of gold light and streaked the sky with wide slashes of red and purple.

It was beautiful, and when Dave and Beth looked at each other, the good feelings drowned out the hum, if only for a moment. They embraced and kissed with genuine passion.

Then the day was over. The sun dropped behind the mountains, and the humming noise became more pronounced. After unpacking the car, they ate a cold supper of baked beans straight out of the can. Beth set about making the bed upstairs and straightening up while Dave took a walk down to the lake’s edge.

The night was perfectly still except for the hum. All the usual sounds—night birds and crickets and frogs—were silent. The lake looked like a large pane of smoky glass. Stars twinkled in the velvety sky above. It was all so serene as Dave sat down on a weather-stripped tree trunk that had washed ashore. He sighed as he looked up at the night sky.

The noise was changing again.

Now, there was an undertone of a long, drawn-out, squeaky sound that reminded him of fingernails raking down a chalkboard. At least it was the only sound. No blaring TVs … no pounding stereos … no gun shots.

How long can this go on?
he wondered.
How long can any of us handle this before we all go mad and exterminate ourselves?

He heaved a sigh as he looked up at the night sky. The constellations spread across the sky like salt on black velvet. At first, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing when he noticed something falling from the sky. A few dark flakes drifted down onto the lake’s surface like soot from a bonfire.

Like a child in a snowstorm, Dave reached up and tried to catch some of the falling flakes.

Funny
, he thought,
I don’t smell smoke.

He looked at his hand. The flakes lay in the cup of his palm, but they weren’t soft and crumbly like ash. They were hard and thin, with a dark, brittle surface. They crunched like fragile glass when he poked them with his index finger. They were falling all around him, now, dusting his upturned face and shoulders.

Jesus Christ
he thought.
It looks like paint chips
.

Curious, he looked up again. By now the flakes were sifting down rapidly from the sky. As he watched, he became aware of the low, steady vibration beneath his feet and all around him. It felt like a mild electrical current making the forest vibrate like a tuning fork. As he watched the sky, irregular yellow splotches began to appear overhead as more and more black paint fell away, exposing a dull, cracked surface behind. After a time, silver and yellow flakes began to fall, too. Dave watched in amazement, his mouth dry, his mind numb.