THE GUY IN WHITE 
Paul B. Metzger

     David Morales squinted through the windshield. “Jan, I’m at the scene. Looks pretty quiet.” He released the radio’s button.

     No one answered.

     He panned the spotlight. All windows were dark. There, on the walk just short of the porch, was the victim.

     He tried the radio again. “Jan, I’m at the Vanderhof estate, I see the body, but the house is dark. Request backup, over?”

     The radio remained quiet.

     David rolled his eyes. “Dispatch, are you receiving?”

     Silence. He turned the volume up, slowly, so a response would not blast him. With the volume at ten, the only sound was the unintelligible drone of countless cell phone conversations the radio spewed whenever the car approached the Estates. He listened, eyes focused on the house, which strobed right to left in red and blue, like it was dancing at that seedy club out on 222. The murmur was plainer than he’d ever heard it, but still utterly incoherent.

     He lowered the volume and tried other channels, to no effect.

     Odd, he thought, that no one had come to the door yet; surely the lightshow was visible through the 1920’s Madras lace curtains. Hiding with the lights off until they know it’s safe, David supposed.

     He opened his cell phone and dialed the Vanderhofs’ number. It rang. It rang again. After the fifteenth ring, he gave up.

     Damn cell phones.

     But he knew cell phones were not the problem, despite his conviction (in the face of the phone companies’ vehement assertions to the contrary) that they were responsible for the murmur on the radio and its crappy reception in the Estates’ vicinity. No, the problem was that the Vanderhofs’ answering machine didn’t pick up, as it had the last thousand times his parents had rung Ellen and Harold (the Third) to schedule a hand of bridge.

     He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and chewed on the problem, which left a metallic taste in his mouth.

     What had Ellen said in her 911 call? She’d heard noises outside, rolls of toilet paper thumping off the shingles, rattling the TV antenna, ringing the weathervane. Same as every Halloween for as long as anyone could remember: kids from the other end of town, bolstered by alcohol or worse, too old for trick-or-treating, could find nothing better to do than dress up as goblins, hike up to the Estates, and waste toilet paper in impromptu landscaping sessions. Ellen was just climbing the stairs to wake Harold (the Third) to chase the kids off when she heard shouting, then a shot.

     So: teenager crosses another teenager; gets shot. Or: teenager startles twitchy security guard; gets shot. In the first case, the perpetrator is long gone; that’s a given. In the second, the shooter is likely pacing the floor of his squalid flat in a panic, clutching at his head, because, well, he just shot a teenager.

     Leave the law enforcement to those who can actually pass the exams.

     David drummed the steering wheel a bit more, then remembered a bit of the chief’s advice: You’ll never make detective, and never solve a case, by sittin’ in your car.

     He grabbed his Mag-Lite, checked his sidearm, and opened the door. Something suggested he leave the engine running. He agreed.

     He trained his flashlight on the scene, but failed to catch anything missed by the car’s spotlight. He illuminated the kid’s body. Lanky with a shock of blond hair, clad in black clothes screen printed like a skeleton. The only sound besides the engine was crickets’ calls, loud enough to drown out almost anything else. He thought he detected a floor of babbling voices, like on the radio. He dismissed it—an auditory illusion, he assumed; an afterimage, as he always sensed after listening to that ethereal chatter for any span.

     He approached the body. He sunk a little when he saw the face. Ellery Johansen: nineteen, a few minor drug infractions, some vandalism, one incident of shoplifting. Basically a good kid, David thought, just needed some direction, a little hope, a little less dope.

     He forced himself to look away, scan the front of the house again before approaching the door.

     His beam halted at the lower right corner of the façade. Why the hell didn’t I notice that from the car? The corner was not there. Red embers crawled along a ragged edge that hovered improbably three feet above blackened ground. A fire?

     He knew he should pound on the door, break it open if needed, find the Vanderhofs and get them to safety before doing anything else. But something was wrong here. He opened his phone. No service, read the display. I’m all but a hundred yards from the damned tower, he fumed, collapsing the phone.

     Get out. Grab the Vanderhofs, put ‘em in your car, and get out.

     But that “fire” was not behaving like any fire he’d ever seen.

     He stepped quickly to his right, better to see the south side of the house.

     He regretted it instantly.

     The entire south face was wrong. Those embers glow-wormed along a high, craggy arch connecting the bottom corners. Beneath the arch, the wall was gone, replaced by a cave dropping away, jagged ceiling echoing the filthy orange of dusk’s residue. David tried to wrap his mind around what he saw. He rattled his head and blinked, hoping he could resolve the illusion into a scene that made sense. He failed. Worse, from deep in the cave, he could hear that otherworldly chorus, clear as night, still nonsense.

     Shaking, David wiped sweat from above his eyes, lest it drip down, corrupting the vision even further. With a grind, he forced his mind into gear. Original plan: Get the Vanderhofs out. Yes, that would work for now. But before he could send the signal to his legs, he saw motion.

     In the cave something cast a shadow, monstrous, climbing the craggy ceiling. The shadow exited, its owner in pursuit, ascending toward ground level.

     They never mentioned this kind of crap at the academy!

     A man in a sharp, white, double-breasted suit reached the top of the stairs. He wore a snappy white skimmer, a trim white beard, white wingtips.

     David drew his gun. “Freeze! On the ground now!”

     The man turned. He blinked as a smile crawled across his face. “I’m sorry.” He turned, regarded the cave, and turned back. “You really shouldn’t be seeing any of this.”

     David would be hard-pressed to argue. “Get on the ground, hands over your head!” He disengaged the safety.

     The man tipped his head. “Please. Get in your car and leave, and forget this. You should not have met me. Not yet.” He continued toward the front of the house.

     “One more step and I will FIRE!”

     “…Just that this is always such a busy night… a beautiful, busy night. Mistakes happen.” The man approached the body on the lawn.

     David fired—three shots.

     The man scowled. He reached around, putting his finger through a fresh hole in his jacket. His mouth tightened. “I liked this suit.” He swung toward David, two swift impossible steps, and grabbed the gun.

     David, reduced to instinct, emptied the magazine, thirteen more rounds, into the man’s hand. It sounded like popcorn, the last few kernels, the ones that only just crack open, that chip teeth if you aren’t paying attention.

     The man, impatient but unhurried, asked, “Are you quite finished?” He didn’t await an answer. “Good.”

     David suddenly found himself in the woods, three years back, the final camping trip with Barb and Vivian. He had grabbed the handle of the soup pot, to pull it from the coals where it had rested for the previous five hours. He had screamed, actually screamed. Later, watching as if from afar as Barb guided Viv through the first aid, he felt fortunate to have used his left hand.

     Not so lucky this time. His arm whipped back so fast that joints cracked. He watched the man’s eyes. He watched his gun as the oil began to smoke, as the steel glowed, as the grips melted and dripped away, bursting into flames. He watched until the gun glowed so hot it hurt his eyes, until the man dropped it to the ground, where it vaporized the grass and sunk into the dirt.

     David, clutching his right hand, began edging toward his car.

     The man in white continued around the front of the house, toward the Johansen boy’s body. He turned to David. “Would you be so kind as to turn those lights off? They are very distracting.”

     David said nothing, just crept toward his car.

     The man sighed, a sound much larger than the man, like a dragon. He removed his hat and spun it at the lights. The hat exploded through the blue half—David cringed and covered his ears—arced casually around, obliterated the red half, and returned to the man’s hand.

     David froze.

     The man in white, he looked annoyed, inspecting his hat, brushing bits of colored glass from the straw. “I do hate such displays.” He returned the hat to his head. “But they are, sometimes, necessary.”

     The man knelt next to Ellery. He straightened the boy’s hair. “Such a beautiful boy.” Reverently, he placed his hat over the boy’s face.

     David began to feel stupid; he hated feeling stupid. “What are you doing?” (That didn’t help.)

     “I am simply… retrieving… young Mister Johansen.” Then, fatherly: “He did so well.” He gathered the body, and with effort, lifted. He started walking. “Not quite as young as I used to be.”

     David watched, helpless, as the man carried the body away.

     Before rounding the corner, the man in white turned. “Until we meet again, Mister Morales.”

     David panted, “That’s not going to happen.”

     “Please, Mister Morales, let’s not insult each other. We know how you’ve lived; the things you’ve done in this life.”

     “You don’t know a damned thing!”

     The man, faintly, smiled. His voice grew nostalgic, appreciative. “The way your lovely waitress friend, Miss Angela Brodie, alerted you that she had seen your wife with another. How you watched through binoculars as she shared a booth with young Billy Holgren.

     “How, later, after she had paid Mr. Holgren, paid in a most creative manner, I might add, to replace her car’s—brake shoes, was it?—how you tampered with those brakes. How, the night those brakes failed—”

     “Stop it.”

     “Your wife was driving poor Vivian home from the girl scouts—”

     “Stop it!”

     “How, before the lawsuit could go to trial, Mr. Holgren died, in his garage, of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

     “Stop it!”

     The man in white smiled. He looked down at Ellery. “So you understand.” He looked back up. “You really are very good at doing our work, and I hope you’ll continue. Forgive me for rushing off so, but this is a very busy night.”

     David panted, sweating, watching the man descend into the void. The embers followed, drawing the wall back from wherever it had hidden, before blinking out. Then David collapsed on the lawn.

     Having no credible explanation for the damage to his car, the lump of slag that had been his sidearm, or the whereabouts of the victim, much less an accounting of the night’s events (all he could do was mutter about a guy in white), David Morales was placed on leave, pending investigation.

     Angela Brodie was, as always, sympathetic. She drove David, shaking and nearly mute, to the little motel on 519, and comforted him in their favorite room, number eighteen.

     All night, white knuckles around shaking binoculars, Martin Brodie watched from across the highway.

© 2008 Paul B. Metzger

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