Don't Go Near The Pool
Alexander Hope
Published by Alexander Hope at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Alexander Hope
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Chapter One
In the plush bedroom suite of an expensive tri-level, Timmi Norris screamed out, “Oh, Charles!" She twisted her body in ecstasy on an oversized water bed. The heavy face make-up made the sixteen year-old look like a twenty-one year-old painted to work the streets. She heard the door open on the lower level. There were muffled voices. She jumped up from the master bed; her thin body tripped forward and fell headlong against the bedpost. A large, red knot formed immediately on her forehead.
An oversized bra, stuffed with panty hose, hung, from her frail neck, creating the illusion of two gigantic breasts. She stepped into the jeans that lay crumpled on the floor. She grabbed a light, plaid shirt from the base the bed. For her escape, she ran into the open closet and closed the door behind her. Inside the closet, Timmi slid open a panel in the back of the closet then stepped through.
Timmi stepped from an opening at the side of the house. Her ankle twisted and threw her body inches too close to the edge of the sheer cliff that ran along the side of the giant tri-level house. Timmi recovered her balance and stood trembling on the cliff’s edge. “Twisted Body of Beautiful Teen Virgin Found in Claymore Canyon,” she said. “Breasts Smashed Beyond Recognition,” She recited to the soft, billowy clouds that hovered over Claymore Canyon. The oversized bra slipped from Timmi’s slim shoulders and revealed a much smaller bra underneath. The clips of both bras welded together like a Chinese puzzle. After she threw a long, frustrated tantrum, Timmi looked down and watched the bra hooks fall apart like some magic trick. She threw the oversized bra over the edge of the canyon. The bra floated down toward the canyon floor a thousand feet below. The bra landed on one of many trash piles humped in the desert sand. A tattered, broken-beaked gull tottered up to the bra. He pecked at it, then turned his evil head sideways and looked up toward the tri-level high on the top of the Hill.
Mavis O’Roak, beautiful, sexy, and in her mid-thirties, stood admiring the tight fit, of her new shorts, in the reflection of the mirrored dining area wall. She turned and pivoted and then contoured her hips with her hands. She turned from the mirrors and looked toward her husband, Charles. She pivoted one more time. “Think I’m beautiful?” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
Mavis continued to look at her image in the mirrored wall. “Tell me!”
“I just did,” her husband mumbled.
Mavis looked frustrated then flipped her middle finger at her husband’s bowed head. She turned directly toward him and clamped her hands on her hips. “I mean, tell me I’m beautiful, without my asking. Cosmo says that men who live with beautiful women and don’t find time to tell them that they are beautiful have married only to acquire a trophy to parade in front of their male peers. The need to prove themselves to other males is proof of some homosexual leanings. You should . . . .” Charles removed a large, green-gray, soapy-noduled egg from the crate he had been prying open. Mavis covered her nose. “That smells like rotting flesh.”
“The crate must be all-wet . . . like Cosmo,” he said.
“Better ideas than keeping some smelly, old egg. Why keep that terrible thing?” Mavis moved away from Charles and the smelly egg.
Charles held the egg at arm’s length walked to a set of steel and glass shelves next to the patio doors. He deposited the egg on the top shelf. “Professor Hunter will identify it.” Charles said.
“As what? A smelly, rotting egg?”
Charles turned and stared, at Mavis, while tapping his fingers together in church-steeple style. The ringing of the upper doorbell stopped him from replying. The ringing doorbell caused the smelly egg to rock back and forth, on the glass shelf, with each ring. The egg started rocking so rapidly that a crack appeared in a small, jagged circle around its base. Small pieces, of cracked shell, powdered the shelf’s edge then snowed down onto a smiling picture, of Mavis, on the shelf below. The powder ate through the plastic facing, on the picture, and burned into the 8X10 print, creating a hideous, chinless Mavis.
Mavis and Charles raced up the wooden stairs to the upper landing and the ringing bell. Charles turned and pressed his back against the large entrance-door. His breath came in short, quick puffs in imitation of Mavis. “Hope it’s the mail lady.” He said, cupping his hands, to his chest, indicating huge breasts. “In one of those see-through uniforms.”
Chapter Two
At the exterior of the huge entrance-door, Bill Norris stood checking his own, handsome reflection in the entrance side-panels. He brushed back his thick, black hair and pulled down on the tight crotch of his tennis shorts. He consciously tightened his stomach muscles. The heavy, wooden door squeaked open. “Hi! I belong to that house.” Bill pointed across the road. “My name is Bill Norris. I’ve come to prove that there are living, breathing human beings on the Hill.”
Charles smiled and took Bill’s outstretched hand. “Thank God! Mavis here was just complaining about the lack of Welcome Wagons in this neck of the woods.”
“I’d have brought the Graffees, from that first house down there, but they’re down the Hill. Or I could have brought P. J. Drummer, from that house over there, but he hasn’t been seen for twenty years. So I’ll have to be the Wagon.” Bill reached down and lifted a heavy basket that spilled over with cheeses and spreads and meats. An expensive bottle of wine hung, like a derelict, from a cord looped around its slender neck then looped around the fat wicker handle on the basket.
Charles held the basket in one arm and unlooped the noose around the wine bottle’s neck. He raised the bottle toward the heavens. “Ah, there must be a God or something akin.” He smiled at Bill Norris. “There truly is human life on the Hill.”
But human life was not what they should have been worried about. Some other form of life, tens of thousands of years old, had slipped past the guardians of Good and had been placed teetering on the edge of God’s blind spot. This spawn of Hell would run rampant, without scrutiny, without guilt.
From inside the egg, something watched Mavis’s, Charles’ and Bill’s movements in the quiet house. It panned down the wooden stairs, stairs to what it viewed as the altar of Vodu, with a priest and a sacrifice standing at the altar’s top. It would need to be in the ritual pond to receive the sacrifice. It focused on the fish pond under the stairs. The water was bad. It was clean. Too clear. Too foreign. It panned past the mirrored dining area, past the kitchen to the shelf: the very shelf it sat rocking on. Rocking back and forth on its nodules. Its view was as though through gauze; nothing was familiar. Etched within the membrane of its pea-sized brain was a matrix of how its ancestor’s habitat looked and smelled Deep in the upper hills of Togo, long before the oily green foliage was sun bleached into sparse, balding mounds, its ancestors were nested at the bottom of stagnant lakes.
Its ancestors had outlived all other prehistoric inhabitants of Togo because the great Lord of the Vodu had chosen them as equalizers. They were the beings that would follow the Disciples ritualized commands. The Disciples of the Vodu believed the world was balanced on an axis of Good and Evil. There could not be too much of either. If so, the world would tilt and roll off into the Great Darkness. It scanned the shelf again. The Lord of the Vodu would watch over it: guiding it toward the ritual pond. The Lord of the Vodu watched from the Underworld, while the enemy watched from the Overworld. When Evil dominated, Liza, a male god would bring balance back. Liza’s agent was a great, white bird. If Good dominated, Mondt would come from the Underworld and with the help of the Creatures, from the stagnant lakes, Mondt would bring back the balance. Through the crack in the egg, it panned out through the patio doors at the back of the expensive tri-level wombed by hills with blossom-dotted undergrowth. The scum-covered swimming pool in the center of the patio electrified its ancient memory. Its ancestors were sure to be at the bottom waiting for it to come home. The Lord of the Vodu had watched over it.
Empty moving cartons cluttered the flagstone patio occupied only by a golden retriever that laid on the warm patio surface. The retriever’s fur was stirred by the same breeze that hassled the moving cartons. There was not much for a dog to do. The cartons began to roll toward him. Tom, the retriever, lay on his back, one eye squinted. He watched the box roll in his direction. It just kept on rolling. Just before it reached Tom, he sprang up, stretched, and rambled toward the patio doors. He snouted his way through one patio door, sliding it slowly, and then wedging his body side to side. Tom turned and watched the small moving carton batter itself against the exterior wall of the house. He scratched at the parquet, walked in a circle, then plopped down. Tom was restless. The house smelled funny. There was a strange feeling that he was being watched. He looked toward his master and Mavis standing on the landing at the front of the house. He rolled his red-brown body against the glass and steel shelves. On the top shelf, the egg rocked back and forth on its nodules. It teetered for one miraculous second then rolled over the edge of the shelf. The heavy egg crashed to the floor inches from Tom. Stiff-legged, Tom jumped up, sniffed at the egg, and then hit it with his snout. Like a drunken tennis ball, the egg wobbled toward the open patio door. Tom flipped it again with his snout and launched it over the door’s runners and out onto the patio.
Tom followed then snouted the egg again. He jumped back. A single, twisted claw darted from an opening in the egg. The claw dug into Tom’s tender nose. He turned his head from side to side, and then danced around the egg, barking hysterically. Angrily, he batted the egg into the scummy pool.
Mavis came running through the open patio doors. As she ran, she pulled at the leg of her tight shorts. “Tom! You bad dog! What are you barking at?” Mavis walked over beside Tom. They both stood looking into the scummy pool-water. “Dirty, creepy . . . huh, Tom?” She patted his head. “Something’s in the pool . . . huh Tom? It’s such a waste to spend millions of dollars on a house and location and be too pigheaded to pay the stupid pool-maintenance bill just because it was not part of the agreement in escrow. Charlie-boy thinks he is going to out-wait the pool company. What an idiot . . . huh Tom?”
Patting Tom’s head, Mavis slowly rotated her head toward noise coming from the side of the house. She looped her long fingers through Tom’s collar and led him slowly toward the side gate. She released Tom and stepped up onto the gate frame and cautiously peeked over. Timmi, Bill Norris’ skinny, teen daughter was scurrying across the road toward Bill’s house. Mavis walked back to the patio doors. She studied her reflection in the door’s glass. She patted her long hair then adjusted her tight shorts.
Charles watched her through the glass. “You look delicious. Bill Norris couldn’t keep his eyes off your new shorts.” The patio door glass made her reflection look oblong and ugly as she walked toward him.
“He admired the cut.” She said.
“He admired what’s under the cut. He only invited us over because he wants to get some.” Charles put his hands on her shoulders, and then slid his hands to her hips. She slapped his hands away. He backed away from her; he backed onto one of the leather-upholstered bar stools that lined the breakfast counter. He stared with hate at Mavis.
Mavis moved back toward the patio doors. She let out a sigh. “Bill Norris invited us over because he felt sorry for anyone who lives by a cesspool.”
Charles turned to her. “I’ll take care of the damn pool!”
Mavis stared at the pea soup color of the pool water. It made her stomach queasy. “You’re just stubborn. Pay the pool company so we can use the damn pool.”
“I’m not paying the previous owner’s bill.” He came up behind her and clamped his strong hand on the back of her neck. “Nothing’s going to rise from the pool and eat you.” She twisted away from him and then stood silently looking through the patio doors at the putrid pool. Mavis was jarred from her thoughts by a nudge from Charles.
He pushed her toward the stairs, snapping at the backs of her beautiful legs with his large, white teeth. “Nothing from the pool is going to get you and eat you.” He snapped again at her escaping legs. Mavis twisted around behind him, goosed him, and then dashed up the stairs to the master suite
Charles caught Mavis and pushed her onto the oversized, custom waterbed. He pounced on her. “The Togo Fons like to make love to their mates for days at a time. We have the entire weekend.” He rolled off Mavis and began unbuttoning his shirt. Mavis darted from the bed. Charles jumped from the bed and grabbed her. He pushed her face-down on the bed and sat on her while he finished undressing. Mavis twisted and tried to escape but Charles placed his strong hand on the back of her head and pushed her face into the waterbed. Before she blanked out from lack of oxygen, Charles lifted his hand.
“Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” Mavis said.
After jumping from her, he grabbed the small vanity chair from the bedside and held it straight out with one hand. He took his belt in the other. He bounced around, in his under shorts, in front of the bed, jabbing the chair in her direction and cracking his belt, and shouting. “Huh! Huh!”
Unimpressed, Mavis, sitting in the center of the bed demurely ignoring him, turned her back and slowly unhooked her halter top and dropped it coyly over her shoulder toward the dancing, puffing Charles. She sat naked from the waist down. Turning slightly, she gave Charles a quick peek at her breasts, and then she quickly pulled the bedspread over her head. After much movement under the cover, Mavis’s hand reached from the blanket-tent; crooking her little finger, she dropped her scanty shorts and panties on the bed then snaked her hand back under the blanket.
Charles dropped the chair and belt. He creped toward the motionless blanket. He began to circle it with his arms. Mavis sprung up and threw the blanket over him. She jerked a pillow from the bed, and while standing, she began pounding him with her overstuffed weapon. “Take that, you animal!” She pounded viciously on him with the pillow. Charles climbed up on the bed—it was rocking like the Columbia in a Norther—then stalked toward Mavis. He was a blanket-shrouded sea creature pursuing his victim. Mavis kept slamming him with the pillow.
Charles enveloped her in the blanket. Charles in his best sea-creature’s voice, said, “I’m going to eat you . . . delicious Mavis.”
They wrestled around on the bed. Mavis tried to wiggle free. She laughed and giggled, and then her head popped up from the blanket. Expectation kept her breathlessly silent. The creature-blanket moved slowly down her body. The blanket stopped. She undulated slowly, her arms folded high across her forehead. She was a racked love slave. She tried to scramble free from the persistent creature. “Stop, Charles!” she giggled, “. . . .No more!”
His lanky body floated up onto her and she was held tightly. He finished quickly. He rolled to the side.
“Hey, Lover, I thought you were going to make love to me for days?”
“Maybe tomorrow.” He whispered .
Charles dosed off. A lost look clouded Mavis’ face and pulled her attention to the balcony doors. Slowly her attention moved around the room to the open closet door. A shadow moved inside the closet. Mavis shifted Charles’s sleeping hand from her breast. She stepped from the bed. Looking directly at the closet door, she moved to it and jerked it open. Tom moved his golden body lazily from the shadows. Mavis grabbed Tom’s snout. “Tom! You scared Hell out of me!" She swatted him on his wagging butt and walked toward the bathroom.
In the dimly lit closet, Timmi stepped from behind the hanging clothes, pulled back the hidden panel in the back of the closet, and stepped through.
Mavis stood at the balcony door. Her naked shoulders were slumped as she looked at the depressing scene below. The virgin buds on the shrubbery that guarded the pool’s periphery made the scum-covered pool more sinister. Moving boxes still cluttered the patio, waiting, as if to be used by some giant child as keepsake boxes for all the things that hid at the bottom of the scum-covered pool.
Chapter Three
Months later, the patio, no longer cluttered with moving boxes, had luxuriant greenery, but green, almost black, scum covered the pool. Mavis and her stepdaughter, April, stood, at the balcony doors, looking down at the putrid pool. April wore tight shorts and a see-through top over her luscious, twenty-year-old body. April looked at the pool while she spoke to Mavis, “Mother, this is ridiculous. I’ll get Dave and his buddies to clean it.”
Mavis shook her head no. “When Charles gets back from Baltimore, he’s going to pay the bill . . . or I will.” She flopped down on the settee. “How is your David? Is he still restricting your movements?”
“He tries.”
“I thought he took your car keys after that thing with your orthodontist?”
“I promised to be a good girl.” April walked toward the master bedroom door.
Mavis stood up and looked, through the balcony doors, at the pool. “That pool’s creepy. There must be things in it.”
“As scummy as it is, there must be tons of things in it.”
“I mean things that are maybe alive.”
“Mother, you’re nutty as ever.” Mavis and April walked down the stairs to the entrance landing. “Have the damn pool cleaned. Let’s have a party and invite a bunch of horny men.” She stopped at the entrance door and brushed Mavis’s hair back with both hands. “Let’s show them the sexiest mother-daughter team in town.”
“I would break a promise I made to your father if I participated in your party.”
“It’s break a promise or dry up like some tottering, old nun. You need to break some promises. I’m sure you haven’t brought a stray home since you landed on this sunny shore. Dear, old Dad has been gone eighty percent of the time. You must have a fantastic vibrator . . . or you’re just letting yourself turn sour like that damn pool.” April pulled open the heavy, entrance door. April fell back when a dirty, gray gull swooped within inches of her face. The gull cawed as it glided around the side of the house that hung on the edge of Claymore Canyon. The gull folded its tattered wings and dove straight to the bottom, of the canyon, almost a thousand feet below. The gull tottered across the sandy floor and stopped at the rim of a small garbage pile. Its broken beak pecked at a rotting banana peel, then rooted under an old Italian loafer baked by the year-around rays of the sun.
The gull glided on the afternoon wind, swooped and turned several times. The gull landed on the edge of the net-less basketball ring with its backboard bolted to Mavis’s three-car garage. April and Mavis stood beside April’s shiny black-on-black Supra that sat smiling in the cool shade that painted the front of the garage. April walked cautiously around the car. She kept her eyes pinned on the treacherous gull. She bent down and took a small stone from the planter. She threw the stone overhand at the gull. The stone bounced off the backboard and struck the gull. The gull dove toward April. It swooped and turned when April ducked. It dove at Mavis and released a ring from its tattered beak. The ring struck Mavis on the forehead. The gull flew away cawing.
“Damn! He hit me with something!”
April ran to help Mavis. She bent down and picked up the ring. “It’s a ring. That damn gull found your ring.”
“It couldn’t be mine.”
“There’s an M on it.” She showed the ring to Mavis.
“It’s a coincidence. Beside its a man’s ring.”
“It’s an omen!” April put her arm around Mavis. She looked toward the sky. “Best get off this Hill.”
“Now, who’s the nutty one?”
Across the road, Bill Norris over-watered his flowers as the sight, of the two beautiful women being attacked by the gull, distracted him.
April pointed in Bill’s direction. ”Damn! Does he look good! No wonder you stay on the Hill eighty percent of the time.”
“His name is Bill.” Mavis whispered.
“What?” April said loudly.
“His name is Bill.”
April lifted Mavis’ hand in a Rocky Balboa style and wagged the hand, by its thin wrist, in Bill’s direction. “She’s down but not out. Hi, Bill! You’re gorgeous!”
He smiled and flexed his pecks in mock imitation of a Charles Atlas ad. “Don’t put up with Manny. Spray him. He’ll stay away.”
Mavis and April walked toward Bill. “You named that beat-up old gull, Manny?” April said.
“No, the residence of the Hill, past, present, and I would surmise, future, call him Manny because he appeared when Manny Scartossi disappeared. Some think he’s the ghost of Manny Scartossi . . . past occupant of your house.” Bill looked over at Mavis.
Mavis looked down at the ring in her hand. She palmed it so Bill couldn’t see it. “You best be going.” Mavis said to April. Mavis smacked April’s heart-shaped rump. The beautiful rump walked over and slid behind the wheel of the Supra. Mavis went around and sat backwards across the corner of the passenger’s seat. Facing April, Mavis had her long legs hung out of the open door. She watched Bill whip the hose from an uncompromising bush. “You’re way too loose.” Mavis kept her eyes on Bill across the road.
April reached over and unbuttoned two of Mavis’s blouse buttons. “If you’d loosen up, you might land him.”
“I’m not trying to land anyone. You make it sound like I’m out trolling. I promised your father I would be good.”
“What promises did he make you?”
Mavis didn’t answer. She pulled herself up and out of the tight, little car. She stood for a moment, outside April’s car, forcing April to lean across the passenger’s seat in order to speak to her through the open door. “When dear old dad first brought you home, I thought you were just another in a long line of women my father used and abused and then discarded. But when he came to me not long after the posting of the nuptials and told me you were having an affair with Iron=man Jackson, or whoever your Nautilus instructor happened to be, I decided I wanted to be like you.” April lit two filtered cigarettes and handed one to Mavis. “For the first time, dear old dad was being treated in kind. But now he has you feeling guilty. Screw it! Invite Billy-Boy to our party. If you don’t do him, I will.” April stretched her tight body over the passenger’s seat and pulled the car door shut. She started the hot, little engine and drove away. She waved at Bill.
As though he was grabbing at a palm-sized fly, Bill motioned to April. She made a screeching u-turn and pulled up next to him. Holding the spray from the hose away from the hand-polished Supra, Bill spoke to April but watched Mavis across the road. April spun the still spotless Supra around and pulled up next to Mavis who was headed toward her house. “He thinks you’re the greatest thing since condoms.” April patted Mavis’s hand that was now resting on the top of the lowered window glass. “That’s my interpretation. I told him you’re available” She kissed Mavis’s fingers then drove away dusting Mavis’s lower legs.
The light road-dust brought out the fine stubble on Mavis’s lower legs. She bent forward, exposing the tops of her breasts, and brushed the dust from her legs. She stood up and buttoned her blouse. Bill was still watching. She headed for her open entrance door.
“Mrs. O’Roak. Your dog!” Bill shouted. He pointed toward Tom who was sniffing greenery a block up the road.
Mavis looked toward the golden retriever, then waved a thank you to Bill, but quickly dropped her hand to the blouse buttons that had reopened. She ran toward Tom. Her short-shorts rode higher with each step. She could feel Bill’s eyes. She caught up with Tom. “Tom, be a good dog. If he’s still watching, wag your tail.” While lifting his leg on the last pungent bush, Tom, without missing a beat or a drop, wagged his tail. “Tom, you’re amazing! I wonder if Gerald Ford could pee and wag at the same time.” She laughed and led the resisting retriever home.
Bill watched her come back up the road. She was brushing her beautiful hair from her eyes. Her beautiful hand was pulling her tight shorts from between her legs. She looked toward him. She self-consciously lifted her hand. She turned up the walkway to her house then disappeared into the tomb-like house. Mavis O’Roak was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
In the afternoon shadows of the second-story window of Bill Norris’ house, Timmi flipped her middle finger at Mavis’ disappearing back.
Inside Mavis’s tri-level, Mavis bounced down the stairs, moved rapidly to the patio doors, the pool glowed black with scum. She jerked the heavy curtain closed in disgust. She took a cigarette from the coffee table, lit it, and walked to the pantry behind the kitchen. From the jumble of pans and dog paraphernalia, she dug out her easel and paints and brought them back to the family room. On the easel, she placed a half-finished canvas. It was a fair attempt to copy an Ansel Adams photograph, but hers had a ghost-like creature swirling in the thundering tide. She picked up a brush. She dropped it back on the pallet. Moving trance-like she was drawn to the mirrored dining area. Her reflection brushed Its hair back, put out a cigarette in the palm of Its hand. It screamed, turned and looked over a slender shoulder at Itself, then took a closer look; pressing the lines from the corners of Its deep blue eyes.
Mavis left the mirrored dining room and walked up the stairs to the entrance. She peeked through the curtains on the entrance door side panel. Bill’s front yard was empty.
Mavis’ naked body was muted by the steam-glazed glass of the burning shower. The phone rang. She stepped from the shower. Her long fingers twisted a towel across her breasts. At the phone, she looked back at the steam filled bathroom. She rearranged her towel: opening it wide to give the phantom in the shower a better look.
“Charles?” she said.
“What are you doing, Love?” Charles asked.
“Thinking of you.”
“Where are you?”
“In the bedroom. Getting ready to take a shower.”
“Are you horny?”
“Now that I’m talking to you.”
“Can’t you wait till I get home.”
“You best be home by Friday or I’ll rent a husband for my housewarming.”
“Just for the housewarming?”
“You best get here and solve the damn pool problem.”
“Screw the pool. Pick me up at National at three tomorrow. Be good, Love.”
Mavis hung up the dead phone. She looked up at a plaque above the bed and read it out loud. “Beauty . . . The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.” Charles hated the plaque. Mavis laughed, lit a cigarette, readjusted the towel across her breasts, and then walked to the balcony doors. At the balcony doors, she looked absently at the cigarette and grimaced at its bitter taste. A beautiful, multicolored bird was perched on the end of the diving board with the Graffee’s gray cat crouched several feet behind it. Mavis turned slightly from the door to snuff her cigarette. A flash came from the pool. The bird disappeared. Mavis turned her head back to the door. She sensed the movement in the water and looked quickly toward the sky. The bird had no time to fly away. The blue, afternoon sky was empty except for a few white-on-white clouds.
Chapter Four
Stumbling around the settee, she ran toward the stairs. Tom jumped down from the settee and galloped after her. They dashed down the lower-level stairs. She tried to pull back the heavy curtain on the patio door, but it caught. She slipped between the curtain and the door and looked at the cat on the tip of the diving board. The cat’s back was arched as though a blast of air had hit it in the stomach. Mavis bent down to stop Tom from following her out into the pool area. A flash came from the pool, and the cat was jerked, screeching, into the scum caked water. Mavis stood up in time to see the cat’s spear like tail disappear into the choppy green-black water. “Something’s in the pool!” Mavis turned quickly and became swaddled in the heavy curtains.
Tom saw a chance for a tug-of-war game and began pulling on the end of the curtain. Mavis struggled with the curtain and Tom and then pulled herself free. But she fell forward and, when she jumped up, she hit her head on the underside of the breakfast counter. She was out cold.
Tom’s smelly kisses helped to wake Mavis. “Yuck! Kal-Kan!” Mavis crawled couscously from under the breakfast counter and stood by the wall phone. She lifted the receiver and dialed.
“Diamond. Sammy speaking.”
“If I pay the bill today, will you clean the pool today?” Mavis says.
“Mrs. O.? Wait, you’ll have to talk to Hulk, I mean Mister Shears.”
Mavis held the phone to her ear and waited but her eyes never left the patio doors.
“Shears speaking.”
“If I pay the bill today, will you clean the pool today?”
“Can’t. All scheduled up.”
“Please, Mister Shears, I have to pickup my husband from the Airport, tomorrow. I want the pool to be a surprise.”
“That idiot will be surprised all right.”
“He’s stubborn."
“A stubborn idiot. If you bring the keys, the money, and admit he’s a stubborn idiot, I’ll send Sammy over in the morning."
“I’ll bring the key and the money, now. When I get there, I’ll tell you all about the stubborn idiot I married.”
Mavis came running out of the house. She buttoned a paint smock over her naked body while she brushed her hair with the other hand which was also holding her check book. She threw the brush and check book into the station wagon and got in and continued to button her smock while she started the car and screeched out of the driveway.
Across the road, Bill argued with Timmi but watched Mavis’ departure. “Don’t tell anymore of those crazy stories. You’re just like your mother . . . the one neither of us wanted to be around.”
“I swear, something’s in that Mavis’ pool.” Timmi crossed her heart.
“I told you not to hang around her house.”
“You’d like to hang around her house. You’d like to do more than that.”
Bill slapped his daughter across the face. He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the house. “No more smart mouth! Stay away from her!”
Timmi broke loose and raced toward the Graffees’. Timmi swung open the Graffees’ front door without knocking. Mary Jean Graffee sat at a long table by the bay window looking through some old story boards of two of her favorite movies she had produced. Timmi stumbled down the stairs and stopped next to her. “I hate him! All he wants to do is beat on me and blame me for his lonely, pathetic life. I wish he would die. Be torn apart by the thing in that Mavis’ pool. Or maybe he will be shot by my Charles. He is going to have that Mavis and that Mavis is going to like it. Charles will find out and shoot both of them.” She pointed her finger and made a pop sound with her lips. “He beat me again.”
“Where are the marks?”
“They’re covered.”
“Show them to me and I’ll call the proper authorities.”
“They’re gone now.” Timmi walked around the living room. “He slapped me. He was going to beat me but I got free and ran away.”
“If you are telling the truth, you can stay here. But I must speak to your father first.”
“I’m telling the truth, but I just come over to talk.”
“Anything special on your mind?”
Timmi moved up close to her and put her arm around her shoulder. “I need to tell someone about the house.”
“Your house?” She turned in shock and looked up at Timmi. “Is he molesting you?”
“Oh, yuck! No! I mean the O’Roak house. The new people. You know the handsome man and the bimbo with the big boobs.” She reached down and placed her hand over Mary Jean’s mouth. “I know, in your day you never used the word boobs. But let me finish. Something’s in the pool. I’m not a liar . . . not about this. I’m not crazy. Something’s in the pool. Old lady Scartossi put it there. Actually Dan put it there.”
“Dan who?”
“Dan, Lord of the Vodu.”
“Voodoo?”
“No. Vodu. V O D U. Old lady Scartossi was into some kind of religion from Africa . . . you know, the Claymore Coven they wrote about after her freaky death.”
“Guadelupe Scartossi died by human hands, not something from the pool.”
“I know how she died. I was there,” Timmi said.
“Timmi, don’t lie to me to make the story better. Just tell the story.”
“There’s something in the pool. I saw it eat a bird and Shake Spear.”
“Shake Spear has not been eaten. He just left here chasing a bird.”
“He won’t be back.”
“Timmi, someday you should be a writer. All writers are consummate liars.”
“You’re just like the rest.” Timmi started toward the door.
“Stay where you are, young lady. I’m not saying anything negative. I love you. I want you to stay with us. And if part of that is listening to some of your tales, that’s okay. Sometimes Llife makes friends of odd bedfellows. Certainly in Hollywood. Timmi, child, you may be the answer to a dilemma.” Mary Jean stood and walked to the French windows at the back of the house. She looked out and made sure her husband was still bowed over the radish patch in his precious garden. Returning, she knelt down with great care next to Timmi. “I have a project I want to do, but Victor is against it. You and your vivid imagination can help. I want to produce a horror film, but Victor says we are retired and that all horror films are trash any way. To have a writer of any repute come to the house would be impossible. But you can sit and talk, and before school starts next week we could have the basis of a good story. I want to shoot it in the Showscan process. It’s fantastic. The audience becomes part of the goings-on. When we show the thing in the pool and Guadelupe’s Claymore Coven we will look for images that envelope the audience.” She stood up slowly and moved back to the table by the bay window. “Look here. I’m going to give you a quick lesson in cinematography. We will be the first women to film a full length story in Showscan. We can make that story of yours grab the audience and pull them into the horror.” Mary Jean Graffee drew a great burst of air into her troubled lungs then sighed a long sigh. “You will tell your story exactly as you feel it. Don’t ever try to impress me with off-the-wall images. Just tell your lies and let me decide which lies we are going to use. Now look here.”
Timmi learned that day about 35mm film. Twenty-four frames per minute. What ever that meant. The human eye could see sixty frames per minute. So a movie just looked like a movie. But this Showscan guy figured out how to shoot a movie in sixty frames or something like that. So the human eye thought that the thing on the screen was real. Mary Jean Graffee and Timmi Ann Norris were going to make a horror movie that would scare the crap out of everyone because their eyes would think it was real, Timmi thought. The thing was, it was no story: it was the truth. If it took too long to get the story down on paper, there would be a lot more blood to write about. The thing in the pool was going to get somebody. Hopefully that Mavis and Billy Boy.
Chapter Five
The next morning, a misty gray image pushed through the heat vapor and became a Diamond Bright pool maintenance truck pulling itself up the Hill and into Mavis’s driveway. Sammy Aldrege jumped from the truck. He wore a tank top dripping with blood red letters that read: “IF IT MOVES. EAT IT!” He wore shorts on his slim, tan, thirty-eight-year-old body. He walked down the path, along the side of Mavis’ house, toward the pool area. A huge portable radio swung from his hand. The radio was nine hours into twenty-four hours of Elvis at full blast.
He use to hate coming all the way up Claymore Canyon Road just to clean some crazy, old lady’s ancient swimming pool. The pool had a converted box filter with a large vault under the drain. If any dirt got caught in the vault, a person could sweep and sweep the damn pool and it would still look like a crap pool. The joint looked spooky too. The old broad that died there was spooky as Hell, he thought. She walked around naked. That was spookier than anything. Her body was a burned-out leather bag with giant nipples. Her skin folded, brown fold over brown fold on every inch of her body. She offered old Sammy lots of action. But old Sammy declined. Said he had the drips. Weird, old broad. Some kind of weird sex drive. She’d come over to him while he swept the pool and she’d run her bone-hard fingers over his cheek and chin. Each time, a picture would flash in his little, pea brain: a beautiful, olive-skinned girl with deep bottomless eyes. He fell in love. And lost about two hours in his brain, then he would be standing toe to toe with the crepe-skinned corpse named Guadelupe Scartossi. He knew old lady Scartossi’s grandson, Tony. What a jerk! He drove a tow truck and owned a shabby, rundown garage that catered to foreign car owners. He looked like some reject from a special effects shop in Culver City. The whole family was spooky. Tony’s mother, Antonia, owned a restaurant that should have been condemned way back in the thirties.
One time, just before Guadalupe Scartossi was nailed to some kind of marble slab, Sammy came back up the Hill to retrieve a canister of chlorine he had accidentally left earlier. He went to the back through the side gate and just kind of looked through a small tear, in the patio door curtains, when he was bent over to pick up the canister. He saw about thirty naked children dancing around in the semidarkness of the spooky house. Sammy got out of there fast. He had heard about how much time -- bad time -- child molesters got in L.A. County Jail. And everybody would sure as Hell think he was involved, the way he showed his jewels all over town. But now beautiful Mavis O’Roak lived at the house. The house was still spooky because of so few windows, but he would crawl through twenty spooky houses to get at Mrs. O. He tried the gate key Mavis gave to Sears. It didn’t fit. He sat his heavy boombox up on the fence then climbed over, “Damn! I knew it. Scum green.” He unclipped a long handled net from the fence and stuck the net into the green-black water. The net stuck and held he tried to pull it loose but failed. “No chance!” He unclipped another pole from the fence. Put the pole in the water and tried to use it to dislodge the first pole. He failed. He knocked on the patio door. No answer. He used a credit card to open the patio door. “In the house!” He moved toward the kitchen. “Mrs. O, you home? You back form the airport yet?” Sammy picked up the phone receiver and dialed.
“Diamond. Jimmy speaking.”
“Let me talk to Hulk.”
“He’s not here. You cleaning Mrs. O’s pool?”
“I’m not gonna.” He took a small picture of Mavis from the top of the counter. It was one of twenty picture of Mavis.
“Mrs. O. there?”
“Yeah. Upstairs waiting for old Sammy.” Behind Sammy, the aluminum handles moved in unison around the pool’s edge. They moved slowly but steadily toward the patio doors.
“BS!,” Jimmy said. “You’re not banging Mrs. O., and you’re probably not banging that Turner woman neither.”
“No BS. Fact is, you can do the Turner pool. Nancy’s not much in the sack, but she gives good gifts.” Sammy fingered a gold medallion around his neck. “Damn, Jimmy, I got to go. Mrs. O. is calling.” Sammy hung up the phone, finished shaping Mavis’s picture, put the treasured picture in his wallet, and then wedged the wallet back into his tight shorts. After walking across the lower level, the pool bum took the stairs two at a time toward the master suite. Someday in the very near future, he thought, Mrs. O. would be begging him to come on up.
When Sammy reached the doorway to the master suite, Tom, the golden retriever, just disturbed from a deep sleep, jumped down from his place on the settee and charged at Sammy. Sammy turned and leaped down the stairs, losing his balance, then crashing into the stairway wall. He jumped to the entrance landing. “Come on, doggy. I won’t hurt you.” Sammy dumped a potted tree in front of Tom and scrambled down the last stairs. “Your owner’s not gonna like it if my beautiful body gets scarred.” Sammy spun around under the stairs and sloshed through the reflecting pool. He lost his shoe and went back after it. Bending over, he fished out his shoe and watched Tom stop at the edge of the goldfish pond. Tom paced at the pond’s edge, growling. Sammy stood puffing in the middle of the pond. He dumped a goldfish from his shoe, and then stood on one foot, like a very tired bronze flamingo, putting on his shoe. He bent forward, put his hands on his knees, breathed in the precious air.
He was going to get a job someplace where there were no dogs and no water and wealthy, sex-starved women, he thought. Maybe in a borax mine in the California desert. He would screw around Point Dume and Malibu, and, maybe, Santa Monica for about six months and get rid of all his juices. Then he would go up to the desert, work the mines or become a monk, or read a book. He would change his life. But first he would have to get his muscular butt out of the damn fish pond. He hated golden retrievers; they were such faggy-looking dogs, like some twit Englishman with long red hair. “Afraid of water, fag?” Sammy moved a foot closer to the edge of the pond. “I could stay here all day. Your mistress will come home and beat your fag butt.” Sammy moved a foot closer to the edge. “I eat doggies like you for breakfast. You think you’re the first mutt that ever tried to get a piece of me?” Sammy started to step from the pond. “Think again, idiot dog!”
Snarling and growling like a rabid coyote, Tom put his front paws on the edge of the pond. Sammy sloshed over the edge of the pond and darted out from under the stairs just as Tom spun around the front of the stairs almost catching Sammy’s ankle with his snapping teeth. Sammy’s hand shot out and pulled a chair into Tom’s path. “Doggy, don’t do this to me.” Great gulps of air dried his throat and burned his lungs with searing pain. He would stop smoking if he got out of the damn house, he thought. He wouldn’t stop Pot, of course not. He kicked Mavis’ easel. It tumbled sideways and puked red paint onto the virgin-white carpet. Galloping through the paint, Tom left red prints in a zigzag pattern across the room. Sammy reached the patio doors. He slammed through, guillotining the fingers of his left hand. “Oh! Damn! Damn! Damn!”
The staccato blast of the radio and the throbbing pain in his left hand pounded bile into Sammy’s throat and nostrils. He leaned against the patio doors, trying to pry his shoe on with the fingers of his good hand. But the cramped position caused his stomach to pump more bile. He spat a dead-mouse pattern on the gray patio surface. Holding the bottom of his tank top over his nose and mouth, he began coughing and gagging. His fast-food lunch rapidly covered two squares of the hot patio surface. He wiped his mouth on his forearm then turned and shouted, “Damn dog! I should kill you and throw you in this scum pond.”
Tom clawed frantically on the glass of the patio doors. Blood red-paint streaks slashed the glass like test strokes for a drunken Picasso painting. Tom barked hysterically.
Sammy stood on one foot. He was trying to force his new Ked up over his long wet toes. He choked on the stench coming from the pool. Failing in his efforts to put the Ked on, he threw the offending shoe at the blasting radio and made a direct hit. The aluminum handles in the pool had moved directly across from Sammy. Sammy’s eyes widened and continued to stare over his cupped hands. Blinking sporadically, his eyes focused and refocused on every shadowed, malevolent crevice of the patio, then refocused on the balcony door. Timmi Norris peeked from the window like some caged animal happy to be safe and sound behind glass and steel. “What are you looking at?” he spat toward her. He hopped around the pool to his toppled, still-blasting radio. He’d seen the little bitch before, he thought, watching him from the top window across the road as he unloaded his stuff from the old Diamond Bright truck. The little bitch must never go to school on Tuesdays. Maybe she was house sitting Mrs’ O.’s joint. Where the Hell was she when the dog was attacking?
He held his cupped hands over his nose but peeked over them at the aluminum handles that were following him. They passed him as he reached the radio. They sat menacingly between him and his escape—the locked side gate. He tried to shuffle past the handles, but swayed, toward the pool, completing an off-balance Chaplin before he stumbled into the water. He thrashed around in the scummy water. His hands appeared at the edge of the pool to grope their way toward the shallow end. He pulled himself up over the edge then looked up toward the balcony door. Timmi stood with her hands cupped to her mouth; fright burned in her eyes. “You want to see something?” Sammy slipped out of his tank top and shorts and threw them toward the balcony. He stood naked at the edge of the pool. Hell, he had really gone over the edge. The broad couldn’t be more than fourteen, he thought. All he needed was to be picked up for exposing himself to some minor. They would have his pretty butt in the county jail. But the kid was screaming like the sight of him naked was blowing her mind. Damn! She will freak out and call the cops! Sammy thought.
Teeth clamped onto Sammy’s face. He was jerked into the foul water. The putrid water swirled and spun then stilled and became smooth as the surface of an expensive billiard table. Tom clawed more frantically at the patio doors.
Timmi stood frozen at the balcony door. She saw the shadow in the bottom of the pool. "Oh! Damn! It got the pool guy," she said. He’d been trying to show himself to her every Tuesday for more than a year. Right out there on Clayton Canyon Road in front of God and everyone. Something was always happening at the house on Tuesdays. It was Tuesdays that she used to sneak into the house. It wasn’t her father’s future-action bimbo's then; it belonged to Old Lady Scartossi. She was over a hundred years old. Timmi ditched school then and stood in the upper window of her house and watched the pool guy load his truck. She wasn’t there to watch him. She knew that, as soon as he was gone, all the old weirdos would start arriving. The Claymore Coven met on Tuesdays. From Timmi’s secret place on the upper landing, she watched as the old, shriveled octogenarians disrobed and marched around with candles and dead rodents. They marched on a huge, red, five-pointed Witches Foot. The Witches Foot was laid as a mosaic into the marble floor and covered from prying eyes by a large fur rug when unused. They marched and chanted and they turned into children who waited for the six-inch steel spikes to glow red-hot in the log-stuffed fireplace.
Suddenly, members of the Sword of Expulsion or something like that came in white robes and clubbed the children. The children changed back into injured, old people and then they fled the house. When the spikes were molten hot, a leather-skinned skeleton-man came forward, tonged a spike from the hot ashes and moved to the edge of the Witches Foot. From the bowels of the Witches Foot, a blood red marble slab rose through the parting floor. Old Lady Scartossi was strapped spread-eagled to the opaque surface. Blood bubbled and churned under the slab’s surface. The old lady’s naked body looked atrophied but it pulled and twisted at the restraints. The first glowing spike was driven down through her cadaverous abdomen and into the marble slab with just one quick move of the hand of the skeleton-man. Old Lady Scartossi’s screams always panicked Timmi, but Timmi stayed until all twenty-one red-hot spikes were slammed through the old lady. Old Lady Scartossi screamed and twisted in pain, and her body went slack. Everything went silent.
Timmi’s thoughts were interrupted by Sammy’s harsh whisper from his damaged voice box. “Help me!” He crawled crablike in the shallow end toward the edge of the pool. His throat was slit; one eye was torn from his face. Green-black water poured from the eye socket. He reached his trembling hands out toward the end of the pool. Then disregarding the searing pain, he snapped his head upward like some smashed mechanical toy programmed to seek out the balcony and the catatonic Timmi. “Help meee!” Teeth flashed, then clamped on the back of Sammy’s neck and jerked him back into the deep water. His legs cartwheeled high into the air and splashed down behind his submerging head. The water whirl pooled. Sammy disappeared. Silence.
Timmi saw the movement in the water. There would be proof that she was not a liar, she thought. Mary Jean and everybody would believe her. Something was in the pool. Sammy bobbed face up and his good eye focused on Timmi. His arms and legs draped straight down in the water; his spinal cord had been severed. The raw socket of his missing eye started twitching. Damn! he thought. That was how it was. You finally decide to straighten up you act and the whole earth opens up and sucks the life right out you. It was the worst nightmare old Sammy had ever had, bar none. He must have ate too much popcorn before bedtime. Probably got a hull caught in his colon. He would wake up. It would be a sunny day. Some thing started towing him. His head trailed in the water. His battered body, towed by the unseen Creature, moved slowly around the edge of the pool, with his head trailing face up. His body moved faster and faster around the pool until it moved at a maddening speed. Whipped around the pool, Sammy’s body became a blur, and then the Creature jerked him into the swirling water. The water calmed.
A popping sound came from the far end of the pool. Sammy’s body bobbed up under the diving board. He puked what was left of his intestines into the churning water. Pain spun from his groin to his brain, then drilled out through his skull, splintering it and shooting the splinters back into his raw nerves, he thought if the nightmare didn’t stop, he would die. Hell! He wanted to die! He was screaming for mercy but his mouth was clamped shut. His head rested against the narrowest part of the swimming pool. His head began to wag, smashing slowly against the right side of the pool’s edge then the left -- right -- left, right, left, right, left, rightleft, rightleft, rightleftrightleft. Sammy prayed for unconsciousness. Pain burned through his skull and exploded in his brain. He couldn’t feel his legs. Some impossible thing was spinning him around a scum pond on top the evil Hill. Faster back and forth, his blood-matted head wagged like a rag doll. His head smashed the pool’s edge faster and faster, and then in a frenzy, his body was snapped straight up, his skull smashed against the underside of the diving board. Sammy was yanked down into a whirlpool. Green-black swirls churned in the pool.
Green-black swirls of the polished stones in Mavis’s earrings shone in the late afternoon, California sun. The station wagon moved quickly off Pacific Coast Highway, moving rapidly up Claymore Canyon Road’s twisting path.
Timmi watched the slate green water in the pool. If she told her father even a small portion of what she knew about the evil house and the scum-green pool, her father would slap her silly or gouge his fingers into her arm or drag her to her room and throw her against the wall. He would call her a liar. He would phone her bimbo mother and tell her that her idiot daughter was a liar. No one would believe her. Only that Mavis. Maybe the thing in the pool would get that Mavis. And her father. Get them together when they’re screwing on the patio table.
Chapter 6
Mavis looked fantastic in her Baltimore chic. She drove, as usual. She decided to wear the outfit Charles had bought her the last time they were at the Mt. Royal. She wanted him very happy before she gave him the news. He was going to be Teed—real Teed—Teed with a capital T. A deer darted out a couple of yards in front of the land bridge. “Oh, Charles, did you see that?”
“Never mind the damn deer. Tell me!”
“Tell you what, Charles?”
“No damn games. Tell me!”
“Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars.” She whispered.
“What!”
“Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars!” She repeated loudly.
“I heard what you said. I was starting to ask if you were insane.” He turned and stared directly at her. “Stop the damn check!”
“Diamond Bright required a cashier’s check. I’m sure Mr. Shears hammered it . . . as they say.”
“I’ll hammer him.” He glared at the Diamond Bright truck blocking the driveway.
“You’re not going to cause a scene about the bill are you? Remember, your temper got us excommunicated from Boston.”
“You’re bobbing breasts got us excommunicated from Boston.”
“You son-of-a-bitch.”
“Face it! You and Bill Norris will get us excommunicated from the Hill,” he said.
“Good! I hate this Hill!” She pulled the wagon to the curb some distance from the house.
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