Ordinary Horror

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Chapter One

Here's a horror story for you. An old fellow, a widower about seventy years old, lives alone in an aging tract house in one of those extended tract house neighborhoods that, given twenty or thirty years to mellow, lose none of their bleakness but gain some comfort from the fact of survival--the fact of such ordinariness being able to survive, coming to seem more or less permanent, which gives the people who live there a kind of necessity or inevitability whether they know it or not.

    This old man loves to grow roses in his backyard. And, whether he knows it or not, he loves their springing from such ordinariness. He even has them blocked off, gridded into organized beds like a neighborhood of roses so when they bloom, when he looks out the sliding glass door of his little den at them blooming, they're even more miraculous as if no amount of constraint or definition can keep them back and the arrangement of his garden, designed to emphasize this of course, has symbolic implications as well.

    He likes a cup of coffee in the morning on the patio among the rose beds probably better than anything-better than gardening, in fact, because his inactivity is proof the roses are stable for the moment, protected and receptive to the notion, however faint, that protection is reciprocal in some sense. Nevertheless there's a little anxiety most of the time and he probably understands he's set himself up for it having invested so much so visibly. It's the character of the neighborhood for things to be visible in any case; so many similar houses that close together make anything not belonging to the architecture stand out. Especially, one imagines, viewed from above. There's a feeling of overexposure to sky or space which has to derive from the uniformly limited elevation of everything-low-pitched and flat-roofed single-story houses and not enough nor the right sort of trees to provide a canopy. Domestic space stops about twenty feet up, which makes afternoon light seem too abrupt striking everything at once and dawn and nightfall more sudden and even alarming in a way on cloudless days in the summer when there's hardly any transition.

    Lately the old man, whose name is Mr. Delabano, is concerned about his garden more than usual because of the appearance of little piles of sandy soil here and there in the yard and on the grass paths between the beds. He thinks at first it might be squirrels but it's too early in the year for that and this is too destructive anyway. Nor does it really look like excavation. The piles of earth seem to have been pushed up from below. So he decides it must be moles or gophers and does his best to control the damage, hoping that whatever it is might just be passing through and he won't have to confront the problem directly with poisons or the terrifying spear-traps he recalls having seen advertised somewhere for this sort of infestation. He's determined, as long as it doesn't get out of hand, to wait before seeking advice. He's like someone with a suspicious physical symptom afraid to find anything out but he dwells on it anyway, especially at night when he imagines the damage to occur.

    Every night he thinks in the morning there'll be fewer new mounds than before; he'll pack them down, replace the grass and maybe that will be that; he won't have to consult anybody or speak to his neighbors about it or buy chemicals or dispose of dead creatures or anything at all. Just let nature take its course. The last thing he wants is to hire someone. Who knows what they might do, like firemen in the house destroying more than they save. Just have the patience to let things alone for a bit. These things are bound to come and go.

    But naturally it gets worse. He begins taking his coffee in the kitchen now, looking out the little window above the sink and wondering if his yard is really more heavily infested than his neighbors' or if it's only his repairs that are more conspicuous. He wonders if maybe a cat or a dog might help. Weren't terriers supposed to chase rodents? Then, leafing through the Sunday newspaper supplement, he experiences one of those moments of perfect coincidence or grace. A big display ad on the inside back page in very large print reads, "How to Chase Gophers tom Your Yard and Garden: Get Rid of Burrowing Rodents without Traps or Poisons," beneath which is a strange heraldic-looking cartoon of three gophers or whatever in the process of being cast out, suspended in mid-trajectory, each emitting a cartoon drizzle of anxiety droplets and flanked by four spiky plants (one on each side of each rodent) that look like schematized bromelaids of some kind. Below that are several paragraphs of fine print and an order form. It's the plants that do it-exotic, South American, never-before-available and now only briefly in limited supplies. Nonflowering and more effective than spurges. Root systems antithetical to garden varmints but harmless to pets and everything else. Thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents. How wonderful, he thinks; just a post office box. Gopherbane; Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nothing to do but send in the form.

    In a corner of Mr. Delabano's garden right next to the patio in its own raised bed with a white wooden trellis where the light strikes first in the morning is an "antique" rose that he and his wife discovered clinging to the remains of an old fence rail on a trip through Virginia a couple of years before she died. He's certain it's not wild but beyond that determination has no interest in research, preferring to keep to himself the thought it might be unique-the only example of some unspectacular nineteenth-century cultivar not far removed from the wild but improved nonetheless, an artifact of sorts like a little flame about to wink out when they found it. It's here his attention turns in the weeks that follow. Waiting for the UPS or the postman to ring he thinks about that rose. Listening to the winds that come up at nightfall so violently at times in the summer, sweeping across the plateau of rooftops and mimosa trees and buzzing the weather stripping like a bassoon reed, he thinks about that simple thing.

    In the mornings he attends to it more carefully than the others and when little piles of dirt erupt within the rose beds themselves, he drives lengths of concrete reinforcing rod at two-inch intervals entirely into the ground around it. This takes him the better part of a week and, although it exhausts and calms him for a while, it's obviously an escalation of the disruptive sort he'd hoped to avoid when he responded to the newspaper ad at the first of the summer. Now he feels compromised, tries to think of this as a temporary measure although he can't really see himself ever pulling up the spikes. Certainly it's better than poisons. He doesn't even like to use sprays. Most of his roses were chosen for their hardiness and resistance to disease and, even though this required rejecting some of the showier varieties, he feels compensated by a kind of vitality that permits him to imagine his roses outliving him--at least in theory--carrying something of his affections along like the antique rose which he imagines somehow still retains, in a way not clear but powerful to him, the possibility of the people in whose garden it grew.

    To whatever degree such thoughts are driven by particular longings or regrets, these are absorbed in his regard for the roses. It's the sentimental absorbency of roses that's most valuable to him, in fact-relieves him of any lingering sorrows, draws them off and releases them to the air. This is an image that actually occurs to him sometimes in a dreamy sort of way: an almost mechanical, even industrial, relation between himself and the roses-little chimneys of the spirit concentrating and releasing something essential to him and (by vague and mysterious extension) to the whole neighborhood which he feels is such a superficial imposition on the prairie, the great flatness above which his roses bloom like a signal and whose ancient surface he suspects is still detectable as a subtle topographical inflection of the network of little streets and alleys. On the whole this seems to be a satisfactory cosmology. It invigorates the bleakness-gives a glow to the pale brick, the white-trimmed green asbestos siding and thin white curtains in the late afternoon. But it's delicate. It can't support serious turbulence. It has to be maintained and balanced against ordinary necessities; so he thinks of the spikes as a kind of prosthesis, rusting away as balance is restored, pinning things in place until then.

    Cleaning up after supper, standing by the kitchen sink and looking out the window he can't detect any damage to the roses really. One or two might have fewer blooms than he'd like but that's so variable. He looks around for the newspaper ad to study it again. He's had nearly two months to memorize it but he likes to keep it and look at it now and then for reassurance. He looks under the phone book where it's been; he looks in the drawers of the telephone table and everywhere else it could possibly be but he can't find it. He looks in the back of yesterday's Sunday supplement but now there's a different ad. In fact he can't recall it having appeared in the paper at all since placing his order. Maybe it only ran once or maybe he just never noticed it before and now it's stopped--supplies used up or the company out of business. What was the name? He's lost it. He should have express-mailed his order. What if he missed the tail end of the offer and that's why the package hasn't come? What if all this time depending on it, putting off any sort of aggressive treatment in favor of the perfect solution were wasted, completely lost and now some truly radical operation were required: everything to come out. At this point he's really horrified at what he's done, how stupid he feels he's been. In the sudden twilight he rushes outside, unreels the hose, strikes open the faucet and begins stamping with his heel as hard as he can on the grass between the most recent repairs where he thinks the tunnels must be. Wherever the ground caves in he jams in the hose but the mud collapses ahead of his efforts clogging whatever tunnel there was as he plunges the nozzle into the mess again and again anyway, soaking himself and splashing mud everywhere hoping to break cleanly through into some main artery or chamber and flood the things out. By now it's totally dark, the wind has picked up and he's cold and his shoulder hurts and he's aware of the barbecue going on next door audible and visible through the chain-link fence--the sounds of plastic plates and silverware, a couple of kids making noise. He sits up holding his shoulder and looking up at the dark sky barely blue around the edges. A clinking like bells as the people next door bring out the drinks. In one direction, he notices, he can see nearly down to the horizon--clear through the chain-link fences, between the houses and right out to the horizon.

    That night the winds are worse than usual, keeping him awake past midnight listening to the weather stripping and worrying about his shoulder and thinking he should have put a trash bag over the antique rose to keep it from getting whipped against the trellis. For a while he lies there trying to remember exactly what the cartoon plants looked like in the ad--how many spikes each had and whether these emerged symmetrically or alternated along the stem.

    The next morning he decides to try the local branch library but he's too early and has to drive around a while until it opens. Then, unwilling to deal with the computerized card catalogue and disappointed with the depth of the old newspaper file, he wanders more or less at random among the stacks taking much longer than he would like gathering, at last, a not very satisfactory general gardening book with a chapter on pests and something from the medical section called Amazonian Biotoxins: Their Perils and Promise that attracts him because the pharmacological society emblem on its cover features a stylized plant that looks a little like what he remembers from the lost advertisement.

    By now it's past eleven and he's afraid he's missed the mail. He's afraid he might get home and find a yellow note on his door telling where to claim his package the following day after eight or tens hours of miserable uncertainty. But there isn't a note; there's a package. Right by the front door. About a two-foot cube, plain brown paper and no return address. What else could it be? He places it in the center of the kitchen table, then puts on his yard clothes and goes out to repair the damage from the night before; it's not quite as bad as he feared and it only takes about an hour to fill in the trenches and replace the sod where he can. Then he's back in the kitchen, washed up and ready for the package. Could it have been in the mail all this time misrouted or something? How long can plants survive wrapped up like that in the summer? He tries to make out the postmark but it's smeared. It looks like July maybe--that's only last month; but it might be June.

    Holding a paring knife just back of the tip he scores through the paper and then through the masking tape along the top seam of the cardboard box, folds it back and is struck by the smell. It can't be spoiled. He can't believe it. He pulls out the wads of foreign-language newspaper and withdraws a little foil-wrapped, wire-reinforced wooden crate inside which, nestled in a bed of what looks like moist rubber bands, are the plants, four of them, much smaller than he expected but alive as far as he can tell. The smell seems to come from the rubber bands. They're sticky like old newspaper rubber bands that have begun to decompose and they smell terrible but he can't say like what. They must be a sort of mulch or peat moss, he thinks. There are no instructions anywhere, absolutely nothing except the little crate and its contents. He eases one of the plants out of its nest, picking off the rubber bands. It's only about four inches long with a root system nearly the same size and it doesn't really look much like the pictures in the ad. It's not really spiky; the leaves are more spoon-shaped, each with a fringe of short nettlelike spines and covered with fuzz like an African violet. A flickering of the light like a power surge brings his attention back to the room which seems gradually to have become quite dark for midday. Through the glass door he can see heavy clouds moving in; a flicker of lightning again and a long roll of thunder. He'll have to hurry to get them in the ground but there's root stimulator already mixed and an open bag of peat. He'll throw in some of the rubber band stuff as well--make them feel at home perhaps and it can't hurt.

    The rain starts almost immediately, however, and by the time he's finished he's soaked once more and his shoulder is worse but he's in a better frame of mind. He stands by the sink looking at the garden in the rain. There's one by the antique rose just outside the defenses and the others like traffic lights at intersections of the paths between the beds. Tomorrow he'll place rings of aluminum edging around all four.

He sleeps late the following morning, awakened about ten by cicadas chattering so loud he thinks there must be a new crop. Light seems to rush in through the curtains as if the air had thinned--the glare and the noise sort of combining to make him feel (not unpleasantly) precarious, barely contained, his house paper--thin as he imagines Japanese houses to be. He lies there for a long time listening and admiring the light. He remembers finding cicada husks--nymphs, whatever they're called-translucent like wax paper, attached to trees and the sides of the house, empty and open along the top where the new forms had emerged. Maybe these loud ones were the seven-year kind. Or was it seventeen? He'd heard of seventeen-year "locusts" he thought, and maybe some that stayed in the ground even longer. What possible use could that be. He can hear cars go by every now and then but other than that there's no neighborhood noise, everyone's left for work or day camp, everything's fallen silent but the cicadas chattering in waves like breathing. It's hard to think of the last time he stayed in bed so late. He can remember being sick as a child and the strangeness of the vacuum of the weekday midmorning when all the day's business had left him behind. How everything glows now, how the room almost blooms with light.

    Outside there's some sweeping up to do after the rainstorm but things are in pretty good shape. The new plants look all right and there aren't any fresh molehills, if that's what they are, although the rain or even his activities the night before could have something to do with that. He can tell it's going to be hot and, though it's nearly eleven, he takes his coffee out on the patio, faintly aware that as a celebratory move it might be premature. Still the day seems promising and there are two buds on the old rose about to open.

    He makes the rounds shaking the rain off the rosebushes and returns to the old rose, shakes it gently then teases open the small apricot-colored buds with his fingertips, blowing into the blossoms to help them unfold. There's nothing like it, he thinks. None he knows of smells quite like it; all that's left to carry the scent of someone's garden, some household, a family--who knows, a hundred years ago--as if they still existed; still pumping out the smell like baking bread.

    The cicadas are overwhelming. Ordinarily he likes their gentle buzzing in the summer coming and going more or less with the blooming season. He plucks an empty one from the antique rose and, looking around, notices quite a few others. Just about every available vertical surface in fact seems to have acquired at least one or two cicada husks--the trellis, the rubber wheels of his garden cart, and there's a very good collection along the brick of the house just above the foundation. Surely, one can't actually have a plague of cicadas. They weren't really locusts. He didn't think they fed after emerging or even had mouths for that matter. All they do is buzz. He leans back in the recliner. It's hypnotic after a while--the oscillating buzz, the heat and the clear sky like the ocean or the TV after sign-off. He can hear the summer-school carpoolers, the first wave of the day, the youngest ones returning--barely audible above the cicada noise, away down the street doors slamming, little yelps and squeals. It's amazing, he thinks, how sound travels through the neighborhood. With everything so flat and open it seems it should reflect off the concrete and diffuse straight up but especially in the summer it's as if there were a heavier layer, a high-pressure zone or something hovering just above, keeping sound from escaping and sending it along like whispering through a pipe.

    He rouses himself after a while and gathers his tin-snips and a roll of corrugated aluminum edging for the borders around the plants--mostly just to mark them, distinguish them from weeds. He leaves about an inch and a half showing above the ground; so much the better if it catches a little water.

    It's uncomfortably hot now and the cicadas have become oppressive. He returns to the kitchen where the noise is muted and he can still see the little plants--maybe already a shade greener than yesterday--protected and waving slightly in the breeze.

    Mr. Delabano is used to the sounds of the blackbirds and starlings that have lately begun passing above his house at about the same time every morning. Now and then, if they come by directly overhead, he goes outside to watch as they stream across in a fairly continuous ribbon for maybe a minute or so crackling and whistling like radio static. So it's only after this same noise continues the next morning for quite a while longer, and with much greater volume than usual that he puts down his electric shaver and listen to it. His bathroom has one of those frosted glass privacy windows so he can't actually see what's going on outside but something peculiar is. Some sort of commotion, most of it birds but something else as well--a chattering and batting against the house like hail or the first big drops of heavy rain. Something hits the frosted window, then another--he can't make it out. But there's a great flurry of wings--furious, darting shadows projected onto the translucent glass. The racket is pretty, alarming by now. He ties his robe, retrieves his glasses from the top of the TV, slides open the glass door to the patio and immediately is struck sharply in the forehead by a small flying object and involved in such a terrific flapping and buzzing swirl of conflict that he loses his balance and falls back against the door frame banging his ear and losing his glasses in the monkey grass. Now it's like trying to see through frosted glass again. Blackbirds are everywhere jeering and whistling and cicadas rattling wildly about. It's some sort of feeding frenzy. He recovers his glasses and edges around toward the fence keeping close to the house. He's startled by someone yelling practically right behind him, "You must have something they like."

    Mr. Delabano jerks around; it's his neighbor, the one who likes to barbecue outdoors.

    "You've got something they like over there." He's standing just the other side of the fence with his hands in his pockets, smiling and watching the terrible goings-on with evident delight.

    "It's the cicadas," says Mr. Delabano aware now of the extent to which the invasion appears restricted to his own backyard.

    "You must be raising them, I guess"

    "Oh no," says Mr. Delabano turning away, unsure but sensing one of those teasing jokes that always make him uneasy and uncertain how to respond.

    "That's the Grackle Express."

    "What?" says Mr. Delabano feeling trapped against the fence.

    "The Grackle Express. Just kind of folded back and swooped right down. Amazing. You alright?"

    Mr. Delabano takes his hand from the side of his head and looks at the blood.

    "They get you? Boy, that's Alfred Hitchcock." To Mr. Delabano's horror, the younger man jumps the fence to examine the injury. The sudden movement and the clatter of the cyclone fence seem to disturb the birds and a general departure begins; like unfurling a flag, they lift up in a single great undulation then, swirling around, roll out toward the northwest leaving behind a few stragglers and a scattering of damaged cicadas intermittently buzzing and flopping around.

    "Now that's kind of spooky isn't it," says the neighbor after a moment, watching them go. And it does seem strange--such concentrated mayhem just to stop, reverse like that; like an event run backwards. His ear is bleeding all over his shirt. He stares at his hand, the blood, allows himself to be accompanied into the house.

    "Did you ever make buzz bombs or whatever they were called when you were in school?" asks Mr. Delabano's neighbor putting away the medical supplies.

    "I don't know," says Mr. Delabano with a towel around his neck and a complicated-looking bandage covering the lower part of his right ear.

    "Oh, it was sort of a practical joke," he continues, gathering up the Band-Aid wrappers. "Kids used to make these things--addressed to someone like a regular note all folded up, the kind kids passed around all the time in class but these were sort of like letter bombs. Somebody would get one passed to him and right in the middle of class he'd open it up and the thing would just rattle and buzz as loud as anything; sounded just like those cicadas out there but even louder so the guy who gets it gets in trouble. They had a wound-up rubber band inside with a little paper spinner so when you opened it it rattled like hell and you never could find out who sent it."

    "No, I never got one of those," says Mr. Delabano who has no idea what to make of this but urgently wants to inspect his garden and would prefer to do it alone. But his neighbor just stands there, his hands back in his pockets, silent now and gazing into the backyard through the open glass door. A light breeze carries a faint spicy, musky scent into the room.

    "Boy," says the neighbor softly after a minute, "my wife sure loves your roses."

    It's mostly the old rose--more detectable at this range than the others. A powerful fragrance, Mr. Delabano assumed, was one of its primitive characteristics.

    "Hey, I'm going to be late, his neighbor turns suddenly, Listen, if you need anything, if you think you want a ride to the doctor or anything, let me know. I'm Mike Getz. This is crazy, you know, we've lived next door for a year and now I'm introducing myself."

    Mr. Delabano takes his hand. "Frank Delabano," he says.

    "Yeah," says Mike Getz, "we've admired your mailbox; my wife wants one of those too. So maybe I can get you to come over for a hamburger some weekend--tell my wife how to grow roses. You aren't dizzy are you?"

    "Oh no, I'm fine," says Mr. Delabano trying to look recovered.

    "Well I'm really sorry about your ear. Anyway, let me know, okay, if there's anything." And then he's gone. Out the back door and over the fence.

    Mr. Delabano doesn't move for a while. He sits at the kitchen table waiting for events to die away a little, feeling the breeze through the open door. In a minute he'll get up and go look at his ear in the bathroom mirror; then he'll check the roses.

Copyright © 2001 David Searcy. All rights reserved.