The Dark Country

It Will Be Here Soon

It was a time of leisure and deadly boredom, of investigation and inconclusion, of heat waves and chills under an effluvial sky; of cancer research and chemical juggernauts, of Tac Squads and the Basic Car Plan, of God freaks and camper cities; of no longer suppressed unrest. Assassination, mass murder, ascension to office; the bomb in the backyard and the cop in the woodpile.

Still, had Martin been able to love anyone, he would have loved his father.

"Santa Mara's not what it used to be," Martin's father was saying.

The older man rubbed his hands and glanced around the garage, almost as though expecting to see himself walk in at any moment. Boxes of many sizes were barricaded on the cement floor, some with their flaps tied upright with twine in the style of old-time grocery carry-outs. Poking out of the boxes was an uncatalogable array of picture tubes (dusty), plastic knobs, tuners, dials, tube testers, transformers, radios, cabinet legs, schematics, speaker cones (broken), screws, capacitors, battery chargers, resistors, screwdrivers, manuals, transistors, wire strippers, solder rolls (sagging), sockets, relays, short wave sets, circuit breakers, wrenches, epoxy, white box tape, panels, power cords (frayed), pliers, coils, flywheels, oscilloscopes, wire cutters, washers, templates, heat sinks, mica sheets (cracked), motors, switches, circuit boards, nuts, magnets, friction tape, fuses, vacuum tubes — a detritus of years accumulated privately, away from the light of day.

From the single screened window filtered a hissing sound, as the mother watered her rosebushes one last time.

"So," began Martin uneasily. "How's the new house coming?"

"Oh, your mother — Henny, I mean — was out there yesterday for the pouring of the concrete. You have to watch things with a mobile home. The dirt's got to be packed right. Otherwise the first rain'll sink it all in and burst the pipes. I should have gone out. But this damned numbness has been getting to me." He massaged his left arm absently. "See, you have to make sure she's leveled right from the start, before you let them put the skirting around. There are so many things. Let me tell you.'' He sighed. It sounded like all the breaths he had ever drawn going out at once.

Martin gave up trying to count the boxes. "What's going to happen to all this?"

"Oh, she's got it figured. The park association's promised us a tool shed on the back. I'll have to use that for my workshop, I guess. Meanwhile, there's the storage locker. I put a check in the mail today. Two months in advance."

Martin looked at his fingernails. Somewhere down the block, puppies were yelping.

"Hallendorf's," said his father. "They never let up, ever since."

He cleared his throat. "How is old Pete, anyway?"

His father glanced up with tired eyes.

"He never made it home, Jack. In there the same time I was, you know. Different floor."

"I didn't know, Dad. I'm sorry."

Martin felt his father's eyes on him.

"Jackie? Do you know the way to Santa Mara?"

He tried to read his father's meaning, studying his face like a problem book from which the answer page has been torn out. "I guess I do, Dad," he said finally. He tried to laugh. "I made it here, didn't I?"

His father was smiling strangely. "Good." He leaned forward conspiratorially. "That was why they didn't let him out, you know." He nodded once, as if he had made a point.

"Is that right?"

"I'll tell you, though. There's something that / know." Martin waited.

"I know that Santa Mara's not what it used to be. It never was."

Going through Wiggle Alley opens gates

Hitting bumper when lit activates flipouts

Going into moving hole starts rollovers

Spelling out name of game closes flippers

EXTRA points on last shot scores SPECIAL

One, Two, or More Players

It's Fun to Compete!

Martin hated bowling alleys.

He left the pinball machine, turned over three (or was it four?) drinks in the lounge and then slipped out through the glass door, closing off the ringing of the machine and the cries of children, the clicking of disposable cocktail tumblers, the clapping of the Thursday Nite League down on the lanes and the clattering work of the automatic pinspotters — a dull and numbing sound, something between the thud of vinyl and the knock of real wood.

He got into his car and drove back across town, passing the old Seventh Day Adventist campground on the way; he saw that sometime since his last visit to Santa Mara it had been cleared and a Zody's Discount Department Store put up in its place.

He passed the park, slowing by the picnic tables. Beyond the firepits the old natatorium still stood; he noticed that most of the high windows had been broken out by vandals, so that the building now appeared somehow foreboding, the jagged remnants of panes reflecting the night breeze's strafing of the cold waters inside.

He passed the war memorial cannon, and almost stopped there. Had he, as a child, ever carved his initials into the gray paint? He couldn't remember. As he drew alongside, he saw that it had been decorated with a dark, intricate pattern. Then he recognized the matrix as a web of spray-can gang writing. It covered everything. He could not make out any of the hieroglyphs.

He drove on.

He passed many vaguely familiar tree-shrouded streets, but did not turn into any of them.

He felt a wall of sound before he heard it, and knew that he was near the new freeway. He geared down through the underpass and, after a couple of instinctive turns, found himself coasting into the driveway. Thump. There, now he had done it. Done something. But it was only the mailbox — he had clipped it with his front fender. No damage. But he realized that he did feel something from the drinks, after all.

He cut the ignition. The engine ticked, cooling down, as he sat staring into the familiar shrubbery at the front of the house. Jasmine, he remembered. There had been night-blooming jasmine.

He got out of the car.

Down the block, the puppies were crying again. He headed for the back door, but before he got to it he heard something else: a switching, scissoring sound, as of blades.

He squinted into the darkness.

Near the end of the street, a dimly outlined figure pushed what looked like a lawn mower to the sidewalk, turned and disappeared back into the shadows.

Hell of an hour, he thought. And shivered. It was turning late in the year, and the breeze he felt would soon be a wind. He fumbled for his old door key under the planter. Leaves caught at his hands and face. He knew the scent. It wasn't jasmine. It was oleander.

He sat at the table in the empty kitchen, the light reflecting off the enameled walls and stripped floor.

He was trying to understand. Something was missing, all right. What exactly was it that he was supposed to feel?

There was a book on the table. He reached for it. It was mimeographed, stapled, with a hand-lettered cover. Class of

'61, Fifteen Year Reunion, Disneyland. It must have come in the mail and been left out for him by the mother. She had probably thought he would toss it out unopened, if he saw it first. She was right.

Why had he gone to the bowling alley, anyway? Even as a teenager he had hated it — yet tonight he had gone there. And he had felt let down.

Why?

He slapped the table.

The machine. He remembered. Absurdly, there had been only four balls, instead of five, in the pinball machine.

He laughed bitterly. He leaned forward and squeezed his eyes shut; when he opened them again the lashes stuck together wetly. Crazy bastard, he thought, you poor, crazy bastard.

He knew why he had gone there.

He had wanted to make some kind of contact. One of the girls, perhaps, who had stayed on in Santa Mara. Who had been waiting all these years for someone to come back and — what? Take her away? Take her to a motel? He riffled the pages of the book. The telephone was there on the wall. The information operator would give him a number. If he could just remember a name. He opened the book, reached for the phone.

His father shuffled into the kitchen.

"Jack," he said, nodding formally. "Thought that might be you." He sighed and sank into a chair. "Couldn't sleep. Do you suppose," he said, "that you might be up to listening to your old man yap for a while?"

"There's a lot of things I haven't told anyone, Jack," he said, leading the way into the unlighted living room. "Least of all her."

Martin waited by the couch. His father went ahead and sank into the overstuffed cushions. He heard a groan, but couldn't tell whether it was the couch or not. He sat on the arm. His father handed him the television remote control.

"You ever try any of those psychedelics, Jack?" It sounded as if he were saying the word for the first time; as he spoke, he motioned at the TV set.

Martin felt for the ON button. "You mean LSD, that sort of thing?"

A used-car salesman with freeze-dried hair flickered to life on the screen. Martin left the sound down.

"You don't have to answer, of course. The reason I bring it up — " He stopped. He glanced around, his eyes settling on the doorway that led to the dark hall and the bedrooms. Then he put a finger to his lips, cupped a hand behind his ear and motioned at the set again.

Martin understood. He eased up the volume control until it was just loud enough to mask their voices.

His father chuckled sourly at the salesman. "Look at that son of a bitch, will you," he said. "Those teeth. Like he's ready to eat us right where we sit. Hand me the heating pad, will you, son? I think you're sitting on it."

Martin smiled and felt for the cord. Son of a bitch. He was mildly surprised; he could not remember hearing his father talk that way before today. Of course it didn't matter anymore. It must feel good for him, he thought.

His father muttered and pushed himself up, but instead of plugging in the heating pad he went to the corner, to some packing cartons, and rummaged about. The commercial ended, the program resumed: it was Chuck Ashman, the local columnist, in the midst of another of his late-night interviews. His father came back to the couch, arms full.

He handed Martin a pair of headphones. In the frosty television light, Martin recognized a tape deck and a stack of hand-labeled cassettes.

Everything's changing, slipping out from under him since the operation, the forced retirement, he thought. And now the move. So what if he's a little — what? Eccentric? Was that a word he could use about his father? Well, at least he isn't senile; whatever he is, he certainly has a right to it.

There was a new Dolbyized tape deck, an expensive one, microphones, patch cords and all the accessories. It was a better system than Martin had back at the apartment; in fact, he realized with a sinking feeling, he didn't even have his audio equipment anymore, not since Kathy had cleaned out the place. He hadn't even contested the settlement.

"Looks like a pretty sweet set-up, Dad."

"These," his father said with quiet intensity, "are the tools of my research. At least that's what I call them," he added self-deprecatingly. He leaned back, waiting.

Martin handled the tapes uncertainly. The labels were dated, going back about six months — about the time his father had come home from the hospital — and all were marked Raudive-Shear gold meth., mic, followed by anywhere between one and a dozen check marks.

"You know anything about Voices, Jack?"

He looked up. His father indicated a collection of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings on the coffee table. One of the books was titled Voices from the Tapes, another Unpopular Science. He also recognized a copy of FATE and an old National Enquirer.

He suppressed a grin. So this was the sort of thing the old man was getting into now. He couldn't believe it. He vaguely recalled going into Los Angeles to hear Gabriel Greene lecture about his meetings with the "space people" many, many years ago, about the time he had been going through his science fiction paperback phase, but seemed also to remember that he had had almost literally to drag his father along. In fact, the man had always been methodical, even hidebound in his thinking; the lifelong interest in electronics, the sparetime correspondence courses — that had been quite the right kind of hobby for such a careful, logical mind. But now this.

"I'd like to hear about it, Dad."

The old man propped his hands behind his head and began speaking, staring into the TV and past it. He warmed to the subject slowly, point by point, but soon his voice was coming fast and hoarse, his words clipped, his white hands describing in the air. The gist of it went something like this:

In '64, a certain naturalist had been trying out a new tape machine to record bird songs in the field; during playback, his Great Dane pricked up his ears at portions of the tape where nothing was audible, at least to the human ear (his master's voice?). A boost in amplification revealed a faint, barely intelligible voice abpve the background noise, one with a peculiar, rhythmic, otherworldly cant to it that was soon to become familiar. There then followed other scientists, laboratories, experiments, miles of magnetic tape, and before long "Spirit Voice Phenomena" had been verified; a new movement was born. And so on. With a straight face, Martin's father explained how he believed "the Voices" to be evidence of intelligent beings beyond the physical plane.

"… And there's Dr. Raudive in Germany, who has recordings of 72,000 different voices."

Martin's attention was wandering, but he tried at least to follow the drift. A fleck of spittle flew from his father's mouth; it reminded him of a moth. He didn't quite know how to take all this, though he presumed he was supposed to take it quite seriously.

"You record with the gain full up. That's Sheargold's method. I can only do it when she's not around. You can imagine what doors slamming, dishes sound like…"

"So. Let me see if I follow. You rewind the tapes then, and —»

"Right. I monitor each reel, at different levels, through the Koss headset. And chromium dioxide tape, which is what this machine is biased for. Condenser mikes, of course."

Of course. And does he actually hear things? wondered Martin. Well, maybe so. Maybe he does.

"What's turned up so far?"

His father plugged the phones into the machine, inserted a cassette from the top of the stack and started the PLAY button.

"You tell me," he said. "You might be able to help, Jack. If you're inclined to. I haven't gone over this one yet."

Martin shrugged and slipped the phones over his ears. It began with the sound of his father's voice: his name, the date — yesterday, "one forty-six p.m., Santa Mara, California" — and then a regular, unending hiss as the recorded volume went all the way up..Even in the Dolby playback mode, the surface noise was harshly audible. Like sticking your head in a giant conch shell, he thought.

He closed his eyes, straining to hear a pattern in the wash of white sound, but it only wound on, steady and unchanging, like a perpetual ebbing of water. He began to think of the microscopic particles of oxide passing under the sounding head of the deck as grains of sand on a wide, endless stretch of beach. No voices, horns, telephones, alarms; only peace. He felt the cushion beneath him rise and fall, like the earth itself and its tides rocking his weight through a merciful, dreamless sleep.

He thought he detected a low drone under the susurrus. Then a flash of light danced on his eyelids as the TV screen shifted images across the dark room. He opened his eyes.

He tried to focus. His father's lips were moving. In the half-light, the lips had a bluish, ghostly tinge. He uncupped the phones from his head; the ear cushions broke their seal with a pop.

"… Every night, about this time. Every night. As close to me as that door.'' The old man raised a pale finger and pointed toward the hall.

Martin couldn't know how much he had missed. He waited, but the old man did not go on.

He cleared his throat. "So," he tried, feeling disoriented. "What — how was it that you got started in all this?"

Eyes fixed ahead, his father said, "Kathy left some books for me at the hospital, that time she drove out from the city. One of the times you couldn't make it. Business meeting or something," he said distantly, without recrimination, as if talking about a different life. "Yes sir, I knew I had to try to make contact as soon as I got out. After what happened."

Martin's heart sank as, unexpectedly, he found himself overwhelmed with guilt. I never made it out to visit, not once while he was in there. But Kathy did. Of course. She would. That was like her. Buttering people up, maintaining every appearance. and then, one day, poof. Gone. Just like that. That was her way. She wasn't really cold — merely cowardly. She left some books. Which ones? Unpopular Science? Had she meant it as a dig at the old man's love of real scientific research? No, she wasn't that subtle. In her way, maybe she had actually believed he would want to read about some of her off-the-wall fads. Shiatzu, lecithin, pyramid power, plants that talk. The irony was that this time the someone who had given her the benefit of the doubt was his own father. He wondered if she knew that. Was she gloating over it now in some ashram or teepee or wherever the hell she and her latest curly-headed guru were getting it on?

"You don't suppose she wants them back, do you?"

What? The books? He did know that the two of them had shot their wad, didn't he? Is he that far out of it, then?

He was beginning to get a feeling he didn't know how to name. But he had to pursue it. "Dad, what was it you were getting at before, when you asked me about drugs? LSD, that sort of thing. Remember?"

"Mm. I sure thought I was high, let me tell you. The whole time I was in there. I thought I was on some kind of trip."

"What kind of medication were you getting? You know, they must have kept you pumped full of something after the surgery."

"Oh, I asked the doctor. Painkillers, he said. That's all, just painkillers."

Martin considered. "I've heard experiences like that aren't all that rare. I mean, you were probably running a fever, hallucinating —»

"I might have thought the same as you at first. But then they started coming for me. Every night, right at midnight, whether I was asleep or not. Of course, after the first few times, I made a point of staying awake."

Again Martin seemed to have missed something. "Who?"

There was a pause. "I wish I knew the words to describe them."

"I wish you'd try."

"Mm. Let's just see here once. They were dressed in one-piece outfits, what do you call them? Tunics. They had faces that were smooth and just-not-human. They might have been, but they weren't."

"They — they came into your room?'*

"From the walls. They came out of the wardrobe. They'd stand and watch. Waiting. I thought they wanted me to go with them."

Good lord, he thought.

"Couldn't hear. They'd laugh and point at my cast. Mocking, I guess, because I didn't get it. Finally I figured they had to be communicating on some other frequency. As soon as I find it. Tomorrow maybe I'll rig an RF choke to a 100,000 ohm resistor, with a diode instead of a mike coupled direct into the recorder. Jack," he said, leaning forward, with a charged intensity that filled the room with an almost palpable presence. "Jack, they were trying to tell me something. Do you understand me? They managed to leave a part of it on my cast, don't ask me how. Did I tell you that? Look at that one, will you?"

On the screen, the interview was still in progress. Opposite Ashman sat one of the most bizarre-looking beings Martin had ever set eyes on. Out of a reflex curiosity he moved to turn up the volume, when an identifying caption appeared over the face:

They continued to watch the silently moving lips.

"He could be one," said the old man. He even chuckled. "As well as anyone, I suppose. Who knows?" Then he said, "Maybe I'm just getting old."

Martin turned his head, trying to see his father's eyes in the dim light.

"I must be. Trying to get through to them. But, you know, sometimes I think it's the only thing that keeps me going.

"She got it in her head to move. I can't fight. She says there'll be 'luxury' out there. Less upkeep. There'll be less to do, all right. I can tell you. I'll knock around inside that trailer like a loose lugnut. Don't even know if I'll be able to keep up with the research out there. Of course, after a while, who knows? Maybe I won't even want to."

His voice took on an incantatory rhythm.

"You know what it'll be like? I'll tell you. It'll be just the same as it was here on sick leave, before the operation. Get up. Can't sleep past dawn, anyway. Putter around. Watch TV. Take a walk. Take a nap. Sit around waiting for dinner. More TV, go to bed. Get up again, try to watch Tom Snyder. Go back to bed. Can't talk to her — never could. I don't know what she wants from me, I swear I don't.

"She sure as hell doesn't want me to move my old radios and the rest of it, I know that. Well, she got her way — but only for the time being. They're going into storage. I'm paying for that with my own money. Until we get the spare room.

"She had some of it packed away before I got home from the hospital. Did you know that?"

They sat side by side, not looking at each other. Crickets started up outside. It grew very late.

"To tell the truth, I haven't tinkered with my old sets for a long time. Since way before the accident. God knows, maybe it'll get to be like that with the research. Maybe I never will hear them, after all. Maybe the ones who say they do are on some kind of trip. Or it's a function of the equipment. I guess I have to admit that. Don't I, Jack." It wasn't a question.

Martin felt words caught in his throat.

"You know why I stopped listening to my old sets?" his father said. "I'll tell you. Because they don't sound as good as they used to. They just don't sound the same at all."

The old man rose and moved slowly across the room, toward the television set and the door to the hall. When he spoke again, the voice sounded far away, getting farther, and very tired.

"I was thinking you could help me, son. The research. No, that's right, you have to go back to your work, your own life tomorrow. I understand. It was good of you to come out and help us pack. The movers are taking care of everything. We won't have to lift a finger. It was good of you, though."

He turned back.

"Why do you suppose that is? The old sets, I mean. Why don't they sound like they used to?"

I know why. It's the programs. They aren't the same as they used to be. They aren't the same programs, he thought, and they aren't as good. But he didn't say it. He didn't say anything. He couldn't.

A recap of the news came on the all-night channel; at some point the newscast became something called "Creature Features," this week presenting a double bill of Italian or German horror movies of the sleaziest kind, their screaming and bleeding and dying badly dubbed into English and interrupted every seven minutes or so for repetitions of a commercial spot for a recreational vehicle dealership.

Unaccountably, he began to feel that he was being watched. He left the set on.

He passed into the dream as easily as a breath is taken and released. He was aware of the street lamp outside the window, the lights in the last houses along the block finally winking off, the passing and re-passing of cars on the empty street, the easy silence, and the night.

He found himself stranded at the outskirts of an unknown city. He had forgotten what he was doing there, who had left him, when or if it would ever return. From time to time he froze in his tracks, aware of the long umbilical by which he was attached to an electrical outlet, he did not know where. He worked his way through rubble, picking over piles of rags and discard, even though he could no longer remember what it was he was looking for. The sky grew ripe. A panic began to swell in his chest. There was a loosening, a sag and then he felt it slip away and he could not move. Time passed. His kidneys ached with the dull throb of fear. Time was running out. With monumental effort, with the last of the residual energy in his synapses, he strained his fingers to his pockets. He handled crystals, connectors, the myriad spare parts he always carried with him, feeling for the right pieces with which to effect a repair. Then he began to backtrack laboriously along the cord, searching for an alternate power source. He would jerrybuild a tap and go on. He had no choice. It was his life. His movements were jerky, painfully slow, a metal man in search of an oilcan. He would have to splice in an extra-long, heavy-duty extension that would not fail him again. But time ran out; time stopped, and it was too late for anything: too late for help, for divine intervention or for surcease of any kind, ever.

Martin snapped the television off and sat staring as the image disappeared in a thick, murky cloud of color.

"It will be here soon," said the mother. "What will?"

"The moving truck, what else? Won't that be nice?"

Martin sat at the table, picking at his breakfast. With his left hand he leafed through the class reunion program. Through the window, he saw the gaunt figure of his father; he had finished his morning walk and was now fooling with some of the cartons from the garage. A few boxes were still inside, next to the kitchen door; these, Martin knew, would be the last to go. The tools of his research.

The mother finished wrapping the last of her dishes in newspaper. She had grown cheerfully plump, he noticed, and, perhaps for the first time since his dad had married her, she was humming to herself under her breath. "He talked to you last night," she said.

"Yes."

He went on thumbing through the book. He came upon a page listing several people he thought he had known once. Each had been allotted a paragraph summary of the last fifteen years. He recognized the name of a boy who had been his best friend.

"I knew it," she said. She wiped her hands and turned around in the kitchen, distracted, as if trying to spot some small betraying detail. He knew she wanted his plate. He didn't move. "Well, he surely won't need any of that nonsense to keep him occupied once we're settled into Greenworth. A man of his age…"

She knew his eyes were on her and stopped.

"I'll just see to the rosebushes," she said. "The new people made me promise to leave them, but I've packed away enough cuttings."

He didn't watch her leave.

He returned to the book. There was the name of his best friend."… Bill and Cathleen enjoy water sports, horseback riding, camping and life. The proud parents of Kevin and Teri Lynn, they presently reside in Santa Mara, where Bill is General Manager of the Lee Bros. Shoe Mart…"

He stood up.

He saw his father at the curb, waiting like an animal for the exterminator. Slowly Martin walked to the door. His hand touched a box.

The deck had been re-packed in the original shipping container. He ran his fingers over the brushed aluminum and molded plastic. The tapes were arranged around the edges of the box Hke eggs in a carton.

He wandered back to the kitchen table. He turned another page, started to skim the book, then snatched it up and pitched it into the trash can.

He looked out again at his father, who was now ambling out of sight around the garage, head down, as if watching for cracks in the cement.

Martin picked up a carton. He would carry it outside, wait for the moving truck and put it in himself so that nothing would be broken. He could do that much. And the box underneath. It was probably full of more tapes. He flipped it open with his shoe.

He saw a large, misshapen white object.

He set the box down. The object looked like plaster of Paris.. He touched it. It was a cast, bent and molded to fit an arm and part of a shoulder, the cast his father had been fitted for at the hospital, after the fall. The whitewash was smudged, dirty and — he bent closer.

It was covered with graffiti. Probably the signatures of nurses, patients. But in among the angular, unreadable letters were the words Do you know the way to Santa Mara?

What the hell? he wondered. Was this the message «they» had left behind? He read it again.

It was, unmistakably, his father's handwriting.

He sighed, shaking his head. He pictured the old man saving the cast after it was removed, hiding it, perhaps even dragging it out every evening and sitting there in front of his TV or his machinery, lost between his earphones, waiting for a sign that they had come again. Like the Cargo Cult out in the South Pacific. Waiting, with the sign he believed he had been given, that had come from the inscape of a fever dream. Waiting. For the return of the gods and their answers and their salvation. It wasn't true, of course. It never was. But, he thought, maybe, just maybe there is a key to some kind of truth in the asking, in the very questioning itself; maybe; maybe there is, after all.

I want to be out there, he thought, to be there with him, next to him.

But before he went outside, he knelt down and gingerly removed the deck, disturbing the arrangement of tapes as little as possible. He set it on the linoleum, unwound the cord and plugged it into the wall. He found the mike, the headphones and the last tape his father had recorded, the one not yet covered with check marks, the one that had yet to be monitored.

He inserted it, connected the microphone and headset and started the cassette. He listened to the rushing of blank tape for several minutes. Once he seemed to hear a real sound, only to recognize it as the faint crying of the pups down the block, a plaintive weeping that had been picked up during his father's recording. Then, with perfect precision, with perhaps the greatest care he had ever taken in his life, with one eye on the window and one eye on the mechanism, he depressed the SOUND-ON-SOUND RECORD button, uncovered the microphone, lifted it to his lips and, in the weakest and most unrecognizable voice he could muster, began to whisper calculatedly inarticulate, mysterious and indecipherable syllables onto the track.