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  “The usual,” said John. “Playing with matches. Knife-throwing. Snake charming.”

  “That’s nice. Listen, did the contractor come by today with those tile samples?”

  “Um. No.”

  Cindy moaned. “He promised. I want to get that kitchen redone before my folks come up.”

  “I keep telling you, it looks fine.”

  “Vinyl doesn’t cut it. Daddy will have a fit.”

  “Tell him it’s temporary.”

  “Do me a favor, John. Call the contractor for me.”

  “Okay.”

  “See you in a couple.”

  “Minutes?”

  “Hours, silly.”

  “About dinner, I was thinking of making a—” But Cindy was gone.

  Jason had crawled over to the window and lifted himself up to the sill, drawing John’s attention to the scene outside. The rain had stopped. All that fell now were drops dangling in the tree branches overhead, knocked loose by the wind.

  After a heat wave and two days of storms, cooped up inside with the kids, John could take it no more. “Come on boys. We’re going outside.”

  He slapped a fresh diaper on Jason, made Nigel go wee-wee in the toilet and herded them both into the attached garage where they stowed the tandem stroller. A quick walk to the cul-de-sac and back would do wonders for his sanity.

  The garage door yawned open at the incomplete subdivision. Outside air swirled in, bearing traces of both the lingering mugginess and the new, crisper regime. A nearly sub-audible drone hovered lurked beneath the patter of stray drops, instilling a touch of dread in John’s craw.

  Baby Jason, one and a half, sang the giddy, two-tone song he always sang when he did his favorite things. He loved stroller rides. He had a natural affinity to the outdoors that contrasted starkly to his older brother’s odd indifference to the natural world.

  “Baa-bear! Baa-bear,” said Jason.

  “Nope. No blackberries. We’re just going to do a loop de loop around the neighborhood,” said John. “Get some fresh air. Then daddy’s gonna start making dinner.”

  “No! Pick baa-bear.”

  “Mama doesn’t want us to pick blackberries. That’s why she bought raspberries at the store.”

  “Baa-bear!” said Jason, louder and ever more strident. Nigel just picked at a grommet in the awning. He would be just as happy circling between the driveway and garage.

  What a strange boy, he was. At least John couldn’t blame it on his genetics. Cindy was already pregnant with Jason when they met.

  Jason began to bawl. “Baa-bear.”

  “Oh shush, now. Stop your cryin’ and we’ll see.”

  As much as John enjoyed leaving the cul-de-sac, the blackberry patch was verboten, because the only way to get there took them right past what Cindy called the ‘hell house’. Nigel wouldn’t blab. He never spoke much as a rule, mainly nodding and grunting. Cindy had had him evaluated for autism but the doctor didn’t seem too impressed. “Count your blessings,” he had told them. If anything, he was a borderline case.

  Jason, on the other hand, did nothing but babble, but the information content of his gibberish was quite low. The more he thought about it, the more John was tempted to chance a dash to the bramble patch.

  They rolled down the walk as the cloud-freed sun warmed their faces, the wind carrying the scent of pines and firs down from Connecticut Hill. White Tyvek flapped like loose skin against the frames of windowless houses. At night they looked particularly creepy, with window sockets as dark as eyeholes in skulls.

  The subdivision was only one of a series that the developer intended to build all the way up to the edge of the Connecticut Hill Reserve, their sites evident as teardrop shaped patches of felled forest overgrown with tangles of blackberry and wild grape. Construction on the project had been stalled for nearly a year due to a financial collapse. John and Cindy’s neo-colonial was the only habitable house in the neighborhood, originally intended as a model home for marketing purposes. Cindy would have wanted out if they weren’t so upside down in their mortgage.

  They had no neighbors in their cul-de-sac, but the main road harbored a scattering of A-frames and trailers shaded and mossy under tall trees. Their closest neighbor lived in a bizarre piece of architecture across a grove of oaks—bulbous as well as angular, with curving clapboards and knife-like fins. It looked to John like a cross between a pirate ship and a space cruiser.

  Cindy, usually a walking thesaurus of real-estate terminology, was left mute for words to describe it. Hell house was the best she could do.

  A wealthy eccentric seemed to own it. John once spotted him driving a Tesla Roadster. He tooled around Connecticut Hill on occasion in an all-terrain Segway. A steady parade of much less wealthy eccentrics often visited—musicians of all shapes and genders who arrived for jam sessions that were startling in their dissonance and randomness.

  The music drove Cindy nuts. She couldn’t abide it and had sent John over one night when it sounded like a menagerie of exotic beasts were being flogged and tortured.

  A rusty old Saab parked askew in the gravel drive. It took a lot of knocking to get their attention, but the door finally opened in a waft of pine rosin. The man standing behind it seemed normal and benign enough. He wore a ball cap beneath which spilled locks of long, curly hair, salted with grey. He shared a broad smile and laughing eyes.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hi. My name’s John … um … I’m your neighbor? See, we’ve got a couple of little kids and it’s past their bed time. Could you, perhaps turn down your amps just a tad?”

  The man’s grin grew even wider. He glanced back at the young and men arrayed behind him. “Hear that, guys? Can y’all turn down your amps a notch?”

  “Sure thing.” A red-haired kid with a knit cap and a soul patch bent over his ravaged acoustic guitar and twiddled the air.

  “I’m serious,” said John, pinching his forefinger against his thumb. “My wife … she’s this close to calling the cops. I told her to let me try first.”

  “Cops?” said the neighbor. “What are they gonna do? I’ve read the ordinance. I’m allowed to make music till 10 pm. It’s what the law says. And technically that’s for amplified sound. We play all acoustic.”

  John wasn’t sure he believed him. The noise … music … sounded way too loud for it not to be amplified.

  “Not only that, we’re allowed up to 55 decibels for residential output.”

  “So you’ve … done you’re research.”

  “Used to live in town,” said the man. “Moved out here so I wouldn’t bother anybody and look who plops a subdivision right next door.”

  “Well, pardon me neighbor,” said John. “People have to live somewhere.”

  “Oh? Did it really make sense for Stephanelli Brothers to bulldoze flat half a dozen new subdivisions in the middle of a housing crash?”

  “Listen,” said John. “Personally, I don’t mind your … music … that much. I mean it’s weird and all, but I can ignore it. But Cindy. It freaks her out. She gets all jumpy and snippy. Calls it the devil’s music. She hung garlic from all our door frames. She prays for your house to burn down so you’ll go away.”

  Oh, really? What a sweetheart. How neighborly and … Christian.”

  “Please. Just tone it down a little? It would go a long way to calming Cindy down.”

  The man glared at John and shut the door. The music resurrected immediately, mocking him all the way back to the house, where he found Cindy kneeling with the babies, praying a mile a minute, before the Jesus figurine her grandma had given her.

  That encounter had happened about a week ago. Things had been quiet ever since, much to John’s surprise and Cindy had been impressed by whatever he had done to muzzle the hell house. Today, though, the noise was starting up again. As usual, it started with a low, pulsing drone like an air horn from an old-time firehouse. Nigel plugged his ears. Jason rocked and swayed to the rhythm.

  At least
it was early in the day. With any luck, they would be done with their session before Cindy got home.

  The cul-de-sac was so lifeless and desolate—a depressing place to walk the kids. Driveway after driveway led nowhere, most yards had yet to receive their top soil. They were wastelands of red mulch and gravel and ragweed and withered yews. At least the road was fully paved and every concrete walk complete, unlike the other cul-de-sacs up the road.

  Cindy insisted that the development would get back underway and they soon would be welcoming new neighbors to the fold, but John wasn’t so sure. With so much foreclosed property sitting idle in Ithaca, who would buy a place so far out in the boonies, convenient to no one except perhaps deer hunters and wood elves. If Cindy wasn’t so invested, literally, in the project’s success, he would have insisted that they move.

  At the intersection with the main road, the sidewalk abruptly ended. The developer’s glossy brochures showed a bike path eventually linking the various cul-de-sacs. For now, there was nothing to connect but a series of overgrown clearings where deer and wild turkeys went to browse, and step-dads and their step-children went to pick blackberries.

  The clouds were breaking up. Wind rattled the treetops. Air as brittle as snowflakes sifted down, flushing away the fetid pockets that had become entrenched during the interminable stretch of dog days. It felt good to sally forth from the central air conditioning for a change. For days they had only made brief forays to the kiddie pool out back.

  John started to turn the stroller back towards the house. Jason immediately began hopping up and down in his seat. “Baa-bear! Baa-bear!”

  Nigel sat slumped, arms crossed and indifferent, looking like a bored commuter.

  John glanced at his watch. Three-thirty. He wouldn’t need to start dinner for another hour or so. Cindy would get home five-ish. He had plenty of time to pick the kids some blackberries, wheel them home, wash the traces from their fingers and faces, change them and get a load of clothes into the wash.

  “Okay.” He spun the stroller around and pushed it up the bumpy shoulder of the main road, where the line between man and nature smudged. The stroller had big, knobby wheels that could find purchase in a foot of muck. John had lobbied specifically for the BOB All-Terrain because he had visions of taking the kids the trails and dirt roads that riddled Connecticut Hill. But that was before Cindy had gotten spooked by the hell house, not the mention the unseen beasts that crunched around the backyard on the darker nights.

  The rough ride aroused Nigel from his torpor. He hummed, letting the bumps modulate his pitch. “Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-oh!”

  There was zero traffic on the road, not surprising for a road to nowhere. Downhill led to the bottom of the valley and Route 13, the main route to Ithaca. Up led towards the land between the lakes, but only after threading the maze that was Connecticut Hill, a former settlement that had been abandoned in the nineteenth century, leaving only cellar holes and rose bushes to testify to the folks who once lived there.

  As they neared the hell house and its unkempt grounds, John quickened his pace. The owner had made no attempt to civilize his shrubberies, allowing them to assume whatever shape the sun and wind allowed. If the walls weren’t throbbing, a person might have assumed that the place was just as abandoned as the settlement on Connecticut Hill.

  The rusty Saab was parked cockeyed in the drive again. The same people were attending the jam, or whatever it was, as the day he knocked on the door. The action was picking up inside. The rhythm lurched and thrashed like a failing heart. The drone acquired squeaks and bleats from instruments John couldn’t identify. Ragged, mistuned guitar chords crashed out of the blue like a random blast of lightning, shredding his nerves.

  It had to be some sort of improvisation, no one could write such stuff. John had always appreciated jazz, but the aesthetic of the more modern, post-bebop stuff had eluded him. Charlie Parker, he could identify with. Ornette Coleman, not so much. But this wasn’t jazz. It was something else entirely. Something unearthly.

  He gritted his teeth as they passed, bracing against the chill rippling down his spine. No wonder it affected Cindy the way it did. John’s tastes ventured oceans wider than hers, but this stuff was too far out for even him to digest. He hoped they would finish their jam session before Cindy got home or else his reputation as a household hero and savior of nap times would be sunk.

  A lapsed Catholic, John had been baptized a ‘whitechurcher’, the congregation that Cindy had belonged to when they met. In its early days, it had been a Christian commune known as the Love Covin. Now it was the Covenant Love Community and had shed much of its hippie airs. Some Ithacans called them ‘Whitechurchers’, for the little white church that formed the heart of their settlement on the outskirts of Dryden.

  Perhaps his background made him less sensitive than Cindy, who had been around the charismatic and evangelical branches of the faith all her life. But he was proud of his tolerance. Unlike Cindy, he never stared at the neo-Goth kids who hung out at the fringes of the Commons. Cindy had been raised in a town in Indiana where even a black t-shirt was considered outré.

  She would have thrown a hissy fit if she knew he was anywhere near the place with Nigel and Jason. But weird sounds were a minor toll to pay for entry into a landscape of big trees, blackberry bushes and evergreens.

  They passed a row of huge oaks with neon pink plastic ribbons encircling their boles, marking them for destruction. The first clearing was just ahead but the blackberries here were screened by a veil of poison ivy. He pushed on to the next clearing, which had a denser growth of berries anyhow.

  They didn’t have to venture far from the road. The berries were well past their peak, many shriveled and brown from the midsummer dry spell that had struck as they ripened. He had no problem finding plenty to satisfy Jason and Nigel, fetching plump, juicy berries plucked from nests of thorns deep beneath and behind the shading foliage. He ignored the prickles on the back of his hand as he snagged a few for himself, savoring the slight, wild musk that differentiated them from the blandly tart berries that Cindy occasionally brought home from Costco.

  Trails cut through the brambles, too wide for game; probably worn by the dirt bikes he occasionally heard tooling around the woods. They were temptingly wide enough to push a stroller. A path above the brambles caught his eye; rising through a stand of beeches and mossy boulders—pale granite from afar in the north, deposited by glaciers in a landscape of shale and slate.

  The look and lay of that trail intrigued him, opening possibilities he hadn’t imagined just an hour ago while cooped up in the house. Someday soon he would take the little ones on an adventure. The stroller could handle it. Jason would be thrilled. Even Nigel might enjoy it, for the bumpy ride if nothing else.

  An engine strained up the back side of the hill. Like an apparition, Cindy’s white Camry appeared over the hump, an hour and a half early.

  John flinched, squashing the berry he was about to pick. Thorns raked his thumb, drawing blood as he yanked it out of the tangled canes.

  “Momma,” said Nigel.

  “Yes, momma,” said John. Odd, that she would come the back way, though she had been showing a house up near Seneca Falls, at the northern end of Cayuga Lake.

  He momentarily considered retreating up that trail with the stroller, but Cindy had certainly spotted John’s yellow shirt, the red stroller and the kid’s blue T-shirts. Even if not, she would find them gone from the house and out of the cul-de-sac. She would know that they had strayed.

  So he stood facing the car, accepting his fate like a rabbit playing dead for a coyote. The Camry slowed to a crawl. Cindy’s face leaned close to the tinted windshield, blonde hair flapping as she mouthed expletives he was glad he could not hear. The passenger window descended.

  “Sweet Jesus! What are you doing up here with my children?” Her face had flushed all red.

  “Cabin fever,” said John. “You know, fresh air, blackberries.”

  “We talked about this,�
� said Cindy. “You know how I feel bout that … place.” Her eyes pooped wide. “What’s that that sound? Are they at it again? And you’re out here with my babies? What were you thinking, hon?”

  “They weren’t playing just a little while ago,” said John. “I thought … nobody was home.”

  “Put the kids in my car. Right now!” she said, as if a pack of unleashed hell hounds were closing on them. “I can’t believe you wheeled them right past that house … when they’re doing … that thing they do.”

  “It’s just … music, Cindy,” said John unbuckling Jason and tucking him into the middle car seat.

  “Music.”

  “A little music can’t hurt anybody. They’re avant-garde musicians. They experiment with sound. It’s just art.”

  “I’ll give you art. That’s the devil’s music, pure and evil. Can’t you hear it? Put Nigel in the car. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “I’ll start dinner when—”

  “Never mind. I have a meeting with Pastor Mac.”

  “Meeting?”

  “About the consolidation.” She avoided his gaze.

  John looked at her blankly.

  “Hello? About the merging with that church in Varna? There’s real estate involved, so Pastor Mac wants my advice.”

  “Can we bring the kids?”

  Cindy’s lip quivered. “I … don’t think you guys should come. This might run a little late.”

  “Oh,” said John. “Okay.” He untangled Nigel’s buckle and snapping him in securely.

  “Did you call the contractor, like I asked?” said Cindy.

  “Not … yet.”

  Cindy sighed, exasperated. “See you back at the house.”

  She surged away in the Camry. John straightened up and watched it go.

  He watched her signal and execute the turn, before stepping back into the brambles to pluck another blackberry, gazing again at that path into the woods. The music emanating from the hell house had grown louder and busier. Odd, that that never seemed to take a break between tunes. It was always just one long, continuous jam.

  He went out into the road and pushed the empty stroller back home.

  Chapter 5: Audition

  The Juzek rode shotgun. Aerie gunned her little white Sentra up and out of Cayuga’s valley, heading for a rendezvous with Aaron and his sonic adventurers. She felt a bit queasy, the usual shyness plus some worry that the jam would prove as fun as a train wreck.