Vampire Load

The second electric bill was sixteen dollars and seventeen cents lower than the first, which would have been impressive if Nora had not spent the better part of the month living like Thomas Edison was personally coming to repossess her house. She stared at the number until the laptop dimmed. Behind her, three shirts, two pairs of underwear, and a bra dripped into the bathtub. Damp towels hung over the kitchen chairs, developing the faint sour smell of things that should have been dry yesterday. September heat lingered in the rooms after sunset, and her bare legs stuck to the vinyl seat.

She had lost her job eight weeks ago. The first bill had frightened her into abandoning the dryer, the dishwasher, and nearly everything else that produced heat on purpose. She unplugged the coffee maker as soon as it finished doing the one thing she was not yet desperate enough to give up. The second bill just pissed her off.

“Bullshit,” she said, and reopened the electric company’s website.

The usage chart looked like a range of small blue mountains. There was the Tuesday she had surrendered to the air conditioner, the Sunday she had used the oven. Between them were the days she had congratulated herself for living like an unemployed pioneer woman, only without the useful cow and vegetable garden. But beneath the mountains was a floor. Two in the morning, four in the morning, the entire weekend at her sister’s: the same stubborn shelf of electricity sat underneath everything, indifferent to the laundry dripping into her bathtub.

Nora looked around as though she might catch something glowing guiltily in a corner. “What the hell are you?”

The woman at the electric company suggested a second refrigerator, then a chest freezer. Nora owned neither. There was no pool pump because there was no pool, no well because she had city water. By the time the lady was asking about heated floors, Nora was wondering what luxurious alternate version of her life the woman thought she was living.

“Ma’am, something in the home is drawing power.”

“Yes,” Nora said, looking at her damp underwear. “That would be why I called you.”

They sent Frank on Thursday morning. He had gray in his beard and the patient expression of a man who had spent twenty years finding chest freezers people swore they did not own. Nora decided she disliked him a little. That only lasted about half an hour. He checked the meter, opened the breaker panel, and worked through the house methodically while Nora unplugged whatever he pointed at. The refrigerator went silent. The clocks disappeared. Her bedroom fan wound down with a mechanical sigh. The draw fell, then stopped falling.

“You’ve still got a little over eight hundred watts going somewhere.”

“I told you,” Nora said.

“I believed you,” he said, and she gave him a look. He considered it. “I believe you now.”

Frank switched off the main and went outside to check the meter. Without the appliances, Nora could hear a mockingbird carrying on in the maple with the offended fury of something whose morning had been personally inconvenienced.

“You’re still pulling it,” he said when he came back. The chest-freezer expression was gone.

Nora looked at the dead panel. “With the main off? How?”

“That,” Frank said, “is a very good question.”

More exploring later, he found an old feed branched off after the meter but before the main disconnect. Frank explained it twice. Nora understood perhaps half the business about service conductors, but the important part was clear: whatever it was, she had been paying for it. He restored the main and traced the line along the foundation. When he came back inside, he had dirt on one knee and wanted to see the hall closet.

They emptied it together. Nora threw shoes into the hall while Frank hauled out the vacuum, board games, and a Christmas wreath that shed fake needles over everything. Soon Christmas and Monopoly had been evicted at gunpoint.

Frank crouched behind the lowest shelf. “What’s under here?”

“The crawlspace,” Nora said.

“No. Under here.” He aimed his flashlight at the back wall.

Nora pointed at the floor, because apparently one of them had lost the meaning of under. “Crawlspace.”

Frank ran his fingers around a rectangle almost invisible against the beige wall. Nora had noticed it before. Plumbing access, she’d assumed, or some other boring piece of house anatomy that remained irrelevant until it broke and cost twelve hundred dollars.

He worked a screwdriver into the seam. The panel shifted, then swung toward them on concealed hinges. A small brass pull was fixed to its inner face. Cool air slipped around Nora’s ankles as his flashlight found a wooden stair, then another descending behind it.

“I don’t have a basement,” she said.

Frank shifted the beam farther down. “Apparently you do.”

She followed him because it was her house and because fear and indignation had become so thoroughly tangled she couldn’t tell which was moving her feet. The stairs went farther than she expected. Grit collected beneath her fingertips as she steadied herself against the wall. Halfway down, she found herself thinking about the refrigerator overhead. The refrigerator, the kitchen floor, the roof. She ducked beneath a beam and kept her head lowered after she had cleared it.

At the bottom, Frank found a switch. A fluorescent fixture flickered into life over yellow linoleum, metal shelves, and a workbench crowded with tools. An ancient television sat on a rolling cart. Notebooks filled the shelves, their cloth spines faded and furred with dust. There was a calendar on the wall and a cup of sharpened pencils beside a coffee mug. Under the bench, a wastebasket held a little curled nest of pencil shavings. Somebody had worked here, stopped for coffee, expected to need a pencil again. Her kitchen was somewhere overhead. For eleven years she had made coffee and burned toast above this room.

“Jesus,” Frank said, and she turned.

A man sat near the far wall, his head bowed as though he had fallen asleep working. He wore dark pants and a flannel shirt. The air around him carried a dry, old smell Nora’s mind recognized before it was willing to tell her what it meant.

“Sir?” Frank stepped forward. “Sir, we’re with the electric company.”

Some small, hysterical part of Nora’s brain decided this was the funniest sentence anyone had ever said. Then his flashlight crossed the man’s hand and stopped. There wasn’t enough hand left for misunderstanding. The flannel hung from what remained of his shoulders. One cuff had slipped back from the narrow bones of his wrist.

“Oh,” Nora said, backing away with Frank. 

Behind the chair, something glowed blue-green. Faint at first beneath the fluorescent light, it gathered color as her eyes adjusted, like light under deep water.

“What is that?” she asked.

Frank raised his flashlight. “I don’t know.”

It stood nearly as tall as she did. Machine was the word her mind supplied, but her eyes could find no screws, welds, or seams. Nothing suggested how a person might have fitted one piece to another. She could find no hands in this creation. Rigid branches divided from a thick central column, narrowing in patterns that suggested winter trees, then the inside of a lung. Dark conduits ran beneath translucent surfaces. Nothing moved, but the tiny hairs on her arms lifted.

There was no bulb or screen. The light existed somewhere inside it, washing Frank’s sleeve and the dead man’s chair in pale color.

The things around it made more sense: meters, switches, a battered oscilloscope, handwritten labels. More notebooks stood arranged by year, their dates disappearing into the shadows beneath the shelf. Somebody had spent a long time trying to understand the thing. Nora looked at the chair.

Frank’s flashlight, basically unneeded under the washed out fluorescent, followed the old feed across the ceiling to an outlet behind the television cart. They traced the cord together, down the wall and across the linoleum.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” he said.

Someone had cut the brown cord off the television and spliced it onto a dark cable emerging from the apparatus. Electrical tape curled away from the join. Beneath it were actual hardware-store wire nuts. A viscous gel had formed over the tape.

“You’re telling me that thing is plugged into my house with a rigged up television cord?”

“I am increasingly reluctant to tell you anything about that thing.” Frank crouched with his meter and clamped it around the wire. “Six point eight amps.”

Nora looked at him. “Is that bad?”

“For something you didn't know existed? That's a little over eight hundred watts.”

“That’s my eighty dollars a month?”

“Depending on your rate, somewhere around there.”

Nora had been hanging her underwear over the bathtub. She had spent August sweating through dark rooms while this thing sat beneath her floor drinking electricity like a bridal party in on Broadway in Nashville.

“Unplug it,” she said. Frank looked at the apparatus, then at the dead man. She admitted the dead man made a persuasive argument for caution. “Six point eight amps, Frank.”

He sighed and pulled the plug. The glow faded from the outer branches inward, the last color sinking into the column. Then something stopped that Nora hadn’t known was there. A hum. Low enough to disappear beneath refrigerators and traffic and all the other sounds that became silence once you stopped listening. She had heard it upstairs, in bed, on the couch late at night. For eleven years it had been underneath everything. Only it's absence alerted her to its existence. Without it, even the fluorescent fixture sounded different.

“How long has that been humming?” she asked. Frank looked at the chair. Neither of them had anything else to say.

By seven, Nora had repeated the story so often it sounded like something that happened to somebody else. Police came, then more police, then a detective who asked twice whether she was certain she had never seen the man. Eventually someone carried him upstairs in a black bag. Everyone photographed everything.

Nobody touched the apparatus. That bothered her. Police picked things up with gloves. They put things in bags and turned them into evidence. This stayed where it was while people made calls to other people who apparently didn’t know what to do with it either. Nora overheard the detective tell an officer that nobody was moving it until somebody could tell them what it was. Somebody from the university would come in the morning.

The detective asked whether she had somewhere else to stay. Her sister’s, Nora said, but that was forty minutes away, and she was done answering questions for the day. The man was gone and the thing was unplugged. She wanted clean towels and her own bed. He told her to stay out of the basement.

Before the last officer left, Nora watched from the top of the stairs as he photographed the television cord lying several feet from the outlet. The apparatus remained dark. She locked the front door after him and stood against it until her legs felt willing to take her to the kitchen. The towels still hung over the chairs.

“Fuck it,” she said, gathering them up.

The dryer started with a satisfying thump. Eight weeks ago she wouldn’t have considered this an extravagance. Now the sound was almost obscene. She loved it. She put a frozen pizza in the actual oven, turned on the television, and left lamps burning in two rooms, because apparently she was drunk on electricity and there was no telling where the night might lead. She burned the roof of her mouth on the first slice. For once, she didn’t calculate what any of it cost.

By midnight the towels were folded and exhaustion was winning its argument with adrenaline. Nora checked the front door twice, though she couldn’t say what a lock was supposed to accomplish after discovering someone beneath her kitchen.

She left the hall light on. Its familiar yellow line beneath the bedroom door helped. Sometime after two, she woke and lay listening. A car passed outside. The refrigerator clicked off. Nora closed her eyes, then opened them again. A vibration traveled through the bedframe into her shoulder. Her tongue pressed against her teeth. They were vibrating too.

She sat up and stayed there, he mind doing some 'how about no' bargaining. A transformer, a truck idling outside; a hundred ordinary things made low sounds in the night, but she knew this one. She had known it for eleven years without knowing she knew it.

Out of counterarguments, she rose and headed slowly toward the center of the sound. The hum strengthened in the hallway. Nora started toward the kitchen, then turned. Light showed beneath the closet door. This time it was red.

She could leave or call the police or the favorite frontrunner currently, stand in the yard screaming until every porch light came on. Then she pictured the officer crouching beside the cord. Had one of those idiots plugged it back in? All those people in her house, all those questions, and somebody might have put the goddamned thing back on her bill.

She opened the closet.

Red light climbed the stairs and spread across the shoes and Christmas decorations. Warm air carried a sharp electrical smell, like the air before a thunderstorm. From the opening, she couldn’t see the outlet. She only meant to pull the plug.

Nora put one bare foot on the first stair, then stopped. The light that morning had been blue-green. She looked at her hand on the door frame, at the red gathered between her fingers. Somebody had done more than plug it back in. She descended slowly, and halfway down she could feel the heat.

The fluorescent was off but she didn’t need it. As she reached the bottom stair, the red seemed to strengthen, bringing the workbench and shelves into sharper relief. The empty chair cast a long shadow across the linoleum, and notebooks lay open beneath evidence markers. The television cart hid the outlet from this angle. She moved far enough into the room to see around it. Several feet from the wall, the plug caught the red light on its exposed prongs where it lay still disconnected on the basement floor.

She stared until there was no possibility of misunderstanding. Then she followed the cord toward the apparatus, looking for another connection. Nothing had opened or unfolded. The branches stood exactly where they had that morning. But the red gathered deep beneath their surfaces, making the dark conduits look less like wiring. Heat touched her face. Beneath the dust was another smell, mineral and scorched.

The taped splice lay in the shadow of its base. Nora took a step closer, trying to see behind the column. The hum rose. She stopped, and it settled. Her fingers had curled against her palms. Slowly, she shifted her weight backward. The light thinned along the outer branches.

Nora drew one foot back, feeling for clear floor without looking away. The hum dropped with her movement. She took another step toward the stairs, and it rose again, climbing through her jaw until her teeth ached. She kept backing away. The red brightened.

Outside, porch lights burned above locked doors. Behind drawn curtains, the people who would leave for work in a few hours slept through the last of the September heat. A sprinkler swept its patient arc across a lawn, ticking each time it reached the sidewalk.

The streetlights dimmed momentarily in unison. From beneath the little house came a muffled scream that stopped abruptly before the sprinkler completed its turn. Water scattered through the yellow light and began its slow sweep back.

Above the sleeping houses, the power lines began to hum. The sound traveled from pole to pole, branching off along the wires that fed each house. Inside, it settled into the walls, into the bedframes, and into the teeth of people who had not yet awakened.

Written as an entry for LJ Idol writing contest on Dreamwidth in response to the prompt ‘Vampire Load’