Something Above Us
by Albert J. Manachino
Wanda and Jimmy Walsh, and a third person who was rather worse for wear and smelled of cheap whiskey and unwashed body, left the elevator on the third floor of Wanda’s home. The doors remained open just long enough to disgorge the pair into the corridor and then shut with a sigh of exhausted patience.
Wanda hobbled toward the fire exit, which was at the end of the hall. Her metal brace echoed on the parquet floor. It was for her the elevator had been installed. She paused outside the iron door and steeled herself for the effort to push it open. The first and second floors terminated in landings exactly like this one and there was one more above them. At the bottom of each staircase was a fire main painted a dull red and a hanging fire hose. She said, “Now, Jimmy, when I push this door open, you are not to react. Is that understood?
“Yes indeed, Cousin Wanda,” he said in some confusion. “No matter what I see, I am to stand there with my hands in my pockets as if I hadn’t seen it, right?”
“That is correct,” she responded firmly. She turned to the third member of their group, a scrawny, down-at-the-heels specimen whose appearance proclaimed without hesitation what he was: a Bowery bum. Wanda had lured him off the street with a promise of five dollars to accompany them to the third floor. Other than this, no physical demands, such as work, would be imposed on him. “And you, Mr. Bramley, do you understand what you are to do?”
“Oh, yeh, Miss Walsh, I’m to act natchurly, the way I would if it wasn’t there.” He was slightly miffed at her because she had refused him an advance on the five dollars.
Wanda pushed the door open. The landing was strewn with twenty-dollar bills. The bills followed a trail up the steps to the fourth floor. At the sight Jimmy instinctively bent to pick them up.
“Cousin James!” she declared sharply. The tone would have made a drill sergeant stand at attention.
Jimmy straightened and thrust both hands behind his back in a reasonable approximation of parade rest.
No such restraint was imposed on Mr. Bramley. He whooped and dove on the money like a starving cormorant on a paralyzed fish. For a person of his age and debility, he moved with remarkable alacrity.
Jimmy raised an arm in a motion that was intended to protest such a wanton display of gluttony. Mr. Bramley brought a blackjack out of his tattered garments, an action that suggested he spent at least a part of his time in doing other things than panhandling.
“Make a move to pick up any of these bills,” he said in a voice suddenly hard-bitten, “and I’ll crack your skulls. Both of them.”
Jimmy returned to parade rest.
Wanda said, “We won’t try to stop you.”
“Ya’d better not.”
Moving faster than a cockroach impaled by a spotlight, Mr. Bramley reaped the twenties on the landing with the ease of a vacuum cleaner inhaling cigarette ashes. He stuffed them into his pockets and then followed the trail of currency up the stairs. All the while he accompanied himself with a cackling inventory.
He reached the fourth step from the fourth floor and the cackle turned into a screech of insane terror without so much as missing a note, and then it stopped as if something had clapped a monumentally large hand over his mouth. Mr. Bramley vanished as completely as if he had stepped into another dimension.
Wanda and Jimmy cocked their ears and heard a hair-raising “Squish, Squish, Squish!” that was very reminiscent of bare feet trampling through piles of decaying offal. There was a fleeting glimpse of something that moved too fast to be discernible other than as a blur.
They remained frozen, paralyzed by fear and indecision. For a minute it rained twenties, and when the currency storm ceased, the stairs and landing again were carpeted with twenties. In a way, it was like experiencing a lettuce storm. Jimmy felt faint. He leaned against the fire main for support.
Finally, he said, “I need a cup of tea.”
“Of course, dear cousin, I can use one too.”
* * *
Wanda brought out her best Victorian tea service. She filled Jimmy’s cup and then her own. And to go with the tea, she served an apple cake of her own baking. Tea was always an effective bulwark against the trials and tribulations of the day.
“When did you first notice this?” Jimmy asked after his third cup.
“Last week. I escorted Mr. Krouse upstairs to repair the roof. Fortunately he walked ahead of me.”
“And you haven’t reported it to the police?”
“Really James, do you think they will believe me? Also, if word got out, do you realize what would happen to our property values?”
“Yes, there is that too. Still, I suppose something ought to be done...”
Wanda waited patiently for a forthcoming suggestion.
“We must find out more about it,” James added. “Would you object if I put Tabby at the bottom of those stairs and chased her up?”
“My cat! I should say not!”
“Ummm! That makes things difficult. We can lure only so many bums up there before people will begin to wonder what we are doing with them. Last week, you said? Tell me exactly what happened then. It had to happen before you escorted Mr. Krouse to the roof.”
“Well, I heard a big thump on the roof, but when I went to look, I didn’t see anything.”
“Ummm!” Jimmy sipped his tea reflectively and ate a piece of cake. “Bear with me if I seem to ramble.”
“Of course, Cousin James.”
“The fourth floor is the top floor of your house...”
Wanda interrupted, “All the houses in this neighborhood have four floors.”
Jimmy nodded. “Of course. It is actually too high for an animal to have gotten onto it... but...”
“I don’t think it’s an animal, Jimmy. No animal moves like what we saw.”
“I’m inclined to agree.” Minutes passed and then he added, “This may sound silly, but the roof is flat and...”
“Like all the other roofs in the block.”
“Yes, like all the other roofs... All those ridiculous stories about flying saucers...”
“James Walsh! Are you trying to tell me that you think a flying saucer... an invisible flying saucer... landed on my roof?”
“Something happened,” he said defensively. “And 1 refuse to believe all ETs are friendly, the way they make them out to be in the movies.”
“The big question is, what can be done about it?”
“Let’s put two and two together. It has found that humans are partial to twenty-dollar bills. Let us assume it deduced this by finding a lot of them in Mr. Krouse’s wallet before it ate him...”
“Ate him?”
“Certainly. What would our ET be doing but fishing? Its ship is damaged. It can’t take off. Its supplies are exhausted and it is starving...”
“Fishing?”
“It is using twenties as bait... a corn trail for a chicken.”
“But what can we do? The roof needs repairs.”
“The ET must be caught and dealt with.”
“We don’t know anything about it except that it is terribly strong and fast.”
“We know that it is carnivorous,” Jimmy said. “We can do a little fishing of our own.”
“Indeed!”
“We will need a great big hook, a strong line, and say, a twenty-pound cut of beef.”
She objected at once on the grounds that beef was too expensive to be used as bait.
He explained, “It does not have to be the best cut. You can always use one of his twenties to pay for it. I’m sure he wouldn’t miss a couple. You do understand that I need something to entice it with?”
* * *
The next day, Wanda showed up with a decrepit cut of beef that obviously had died of extreme old age in a retirement home for cows.
She said, “The bill I was going to pay Mr. Schultz with turned into a slimy oil scum in my handbag.”
“Evidently it is using pieces of itself to manufacture the bait.”
Jimmy produced a coil of wire rope and a heat anchor that consisted of a metal shank with an eye on one end and four barbed hooks for digging into the sea bottom on the other.
Under his direction, Wanda cut and wrapped the beef around the flukes and thriftily tied it in place with bakery twine. Jimmy fastened the anchor to the wire rope and thus equipped they headed for the landing.
There he secured the free end of the wire rope to the massive six-inch pipe that was the fire main. They stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointedly ignoring the carpet of twenties.
“Do you think you can throw this hook that high?” she asked. “It seems awfully heavy.”
“I think I can handle it with a running start as if I was in a bowling alley. I’ll go halfway up the steps and let it fly. I don’t think it will have to land exactly on the fourth floor. Bramley disappeared when he was about four steps from the top.”
Jimmy exerted all his strength to make the cast. He flew up the stairs and when he was six feet from the top, he heaved the barbed boat hook and meat. He retreated much faster than he had gone up.
The meat-baited hook was heavy, and the wire rope attached to the free end of the shank acted as a drag. It vanished in a blur about four steps from the top floor. The slack was coiled under the fire main. It whipped upward and came to an abrupt halt, almost jerking the pipe out of the wall.
The wire rope was as tense as a metal rod. Something was exerting a terrific pull on it. It moved from one side of the stairwell to the other as if something above was probing with a long pole.
They heard roars of baffled rage and possibly something that might be surprise or pain. Also the thrashing of a heavy object ricocheting off the walls.
“It swallowed the bait,” Jimmy said. He was too frightened to feel satisfaction that his idea had worked.
“Let us get out of here,” Wanda suggested. “It’s making such an uproar it’ll be heard on the street. You can’t tell if it will decide to come down the stairs.”
“That’s true.”
Wanda limped back to the elevator with Jimmy’s support. Hurriedly they left the house.
True to her prediction, the uproar was audible in the street. “What in heaven’s name is that?” a by-passer asked. Jimmy answered off the top of his head, “Poltergeists. We seem to have uncovered a nest of them.”
“That so? Had them myself once. See the McRoary Brothers; they’re the best in the business.” He went on his way.
The roars and growls were punctuated by the metallic spang! of the fire main bringing up the wire rope short. An hour later, silence descended but prudence dictated they wait another hour to be on the safe side.
* * *
Gingerly they pushed open the door to the fire landing. The wire rope was still tied to the fire main though the pipe was almost torn out of the wall. One end of the rope lay aimlessly at the bottom of the steps like a spent cobra. The meat and boat hook were gone.
“Let us get out of here,” Jimmy whispered. On the way downstairs, he said, “That was wire rope... steel wires with rope braided through them. We should have been able to land an orca with it.”
“It was bitten through.”
Back in the kitchen, they cogitated over tea. “Would you like a fried steak sandwich?” Wanda asked. “I saved a little of the meat.”
Jimmy refused politely. “I don’t know what to suggest. This place can’t be sold to anyone else, not with the one-year sales warranty mandated by law. The best thing would be to destroy the house. Burn it to the ground.” He saw the look of obstinate refusal on Wanda’s face and added, “The house is fully insured, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but at my age, moving and resettling somewhere else will be too much of a hassle.”
“The thing is, you can’t be sure this thing will confine itself to the fourth floor. I got an impression, when I heaved that baited hook, that it vanished a little lower than Bramley did. As if it had descended a few inches. You understand that I was all keyed up and it could have been in my imagination.”
“I thought I noticed that myself. Do you think it may come downstairs?”
“I don’t know. There is a possibility that it is feeling its way... like a blind man in a new apartment. Let us exercise our imagination. Suppose it comes from some place where all motion is on the same level. For it, this is normal. It doesn’t know about depth.”
“You mean that it doesn’t know enough to come down?”
“Exactly! It will be confined to the fourth floor.”
“O o o o h!”
“But this doesn’t mean it will stay up there forever. It might learn to descend. It has been exposed to staircases. In time, it may understand what they are for. Face it, the thing is intelligent. It can construct and pilot a spaceship.”
That evening, Jimmy carried two five-gallon cans of kerosene to the landing. Wanda accompanied him for moral support and, of course, to direct. Carefully he spilled the fuel at the foot of the staircase. They stood outside the metal door. Jimmy struck a match. She held the door ajar for him until he threw it inside.
Wanda slammed the door shut before the match landed. They heard a muffled explosion and smelled the flames and burning petroleum. Quickly they abandoned the house and stood on the sidewalk across the street to watch. The house went up like a rocket.
“There is someone in your house,” a neighbor said.
A darkened shape like a black cardboard cutout was silhouetted against the window with a sea of fire as backdrop. It bellowed and roared in pain.
Jimmy said in awe, “It’s got horns.”
“All poltergeists do,” an onlooker informed him.
“That’s so,” said another. “I have my house inspected twice a year. Expensive, but it’s worth it.”
The house collapsed and the figure in the window disappeared with a final outcry, the meaning of which they were unable to ascertain.
By the time the firemen arrived, there was nothing left to be extinguished but some smoldering embers where the house had stood. Three firemen were wetting down the ashes on the ground to prevent re-ignition. Another firefighter was atop a four-story ladder inspecting the adjoining roofs for stray embers or smoke. He had his hose at the ready.
The onlookers below heard a violent scream and the fireman vanished. His hose and two smaller objects fell to the ground. These turned out to be his boots with his feet still encased in them.
Wanda sobbed. ‘’Oh, my God! What shall we do?”
“When you rebuild,” Jimmy said, “go only as high as the third floor.”
Copyright © 2011 by Albert J. Manachino
