"Nobody Lives There Now, Nothing Happens" by Casrol Orlock (from Women of Darkness, edited by Kathryn Ptacek (1988)
This short, quirky tale is leavened with a touch of Ray Bradbury with perhaps a dash of Shirley Jackson.
In a small California town, locked permanently and purposefully in the 1880s, the Marquettes have just moved into a monstrosity of a Victorian mansion (four stories with five widow walks) built over a hundred years ago by a robber baron to house his mail-order bride. Before the marriage ceremony cold be held, though, she took a lonely walk and vanished. An intensive search was held, but the young woman was never found. The robber baton abandoned the house, putting it up for sale, and there it remained for over a century, being offered by various real estate agents over the years and being held together by new paint every ten years. And then the Marquettes moved in.
The neighbors watched with interest as the movers lugged in the furniture: a grand piano, an antique woodstove, a microwave, a large something that looked like a pole lamp mated with a chandelier, a massive television, a cabinet that could have come from the 1850s... They saw the furniture but they did not see the Marquettes. Indeed, no one did. The Marquettes never left their home, not to do grocery shopping, or to hang their laundry in the back yard, they took no newspapers, had no in-person dealings with the postman, and politely declined invitations to various parties and local events (by letter, of course). They seemed to have occasional visitors, but no one ever saw anyone come or leave. Music from the piano could be heard, and /once in a while the outlines of guests could be seen through the shaded windows. But of the Marquettes, there was no trace. They were only seen once, on Halloween, when the eight Jefferson children dared to approach their door, and even then, they were hidden behind the door, with their arms only showing; for their effort, each of the Jefferson children received a single piece of salt water taffy, wrapped in very old paper and incredibly hard.
Shortly after Easter, the strange gifts began coming. A scarf hanging on a bush behind Ginny Worsted's, an old but useful scooter by the pond where the Jefferson children played, a jar of golden honey in a flower bed, toys for families with children, a license plate frame for seventeen-year-old Ed Windry (who worshiped his old Chevrolet), an apron caught on Miss Emma's fence, a hubcap that rolled by Mr. Wilson's old Studebaker, which needed one...and more. No one knew where the gifts were coming from, but Virginia (who twice served as PTA secretary and who lived next to the Marquettes) suspected her reclusive neighbors. Virginia's husband John scoffed at the idea, as did the other townspeople, but Virgionia held firm in her unreasoned belief.
And with the gifts came a summer of plenty. Gardens and crops flourished as never before. The enitre town went through a period of peace and happiness A coincidence? Perhaps.
Then, come October, things took a different turn. The frost hit and an early winter came. Cruel tricks began to be played. Tommy Jefferson got a high school girl pregnant; his grandmother keeps paying the local stores for items that Tommy has stolen. Virginia found three dead snakes wrapped together on her screen door. All four tires on Ed Windry's Chevrolet were slashed. All twelve kittens born to one of Miss Gilchrist's cats were strangled. a razor-sharp scratch was made on the elementary school playground slide, a very ripe hunk of cheese was left in Wilbur Evan's mailbox, and a skinned mouse wrapped in cellophane was found in the freezer shelf at Fork's Market. Miss Gilchrist wrote a letter to the local paper, hinting that violence against whoever had strangled her kittens would not be amiss.
Virginia's youngest son found a treasure at the beach. It was a "small antique box, water-worn cherry wood with silver and abalone-shell roses inlaid on all four sides." Inside the box were only seven hard bits of candy. The boy swore he had fond the box inside a sand castle.
And then the Marquettes moved away, as mysteriously as they had come, without anyone actually viewing them leave.
That's it. That's the story. No explanations. No rationale. Yet somehow it maintains a quiet, junesy power over the reader.
Carol Orlock (b. 1947) has published only a few short stories; the FictionMags index list only three, although two others at least were published in "little" magazines. "Nobody Lives There Now, Nothing Happens" was possibly her fourth published story; it was nominated for Bram Stoker Award. she is also the author of two novels, the well-received The Goddess Letters (1987), which retold the myth of dimeter and Persephone, and The Hedge, The Ribbon: A Novel (1993), interconnected magical realism stories, the winner of the Western States Book Award. She was married to the late writer Jack Cady, and published two horror books with him under the joint pseudonym "Pat Franklin." She has also written two nonfiction books about human biorhythms and one on the effect of medical science on old age.
No comments:
Post a Comment