But none of that seemed to phase the old man as she talked to him on the phone. He asked her how her day was going, how the kids were, how Stewarts had been the last couple of days, and some other things that she quickly forgot. Every time she tried to ask him about where he’d been, or what happened that night on I-88, he would skirt around the question and brush it off. Finally, he told her to meet him at an address the following day and to not tell anyone about it or that she had spoken to him. And then like that, the line went dead. If Lydia didn’t ask him who it had been on the phone, Janice might have just thought she dreamt the whole thing. It was weird. Against her better judgment, she decided to head to the house.
She had the morning off, only having to go into work later in the day until closing. She got in her car and drove over to the other side of Atkins.
Janice already knew where the address would lead her. She had looked up Walt’s house multiple times over the years, just to make sure he did, in fact, have a house that he’d be interested in selling to her if he died. A small part of Janice had actually been concerned when Walt went up missing that he wouldn’t be able to get the house to her. It was a selfish thought, and one she kept to herself. She loved Walt, but she really wanted that house.
Even if it no longer had windows.
All down the street, there were contractors and Lowes trucks and Home Depot trucks here and there. Everyone was having new windows installed.
The talk of the town was that something had happened with the electricity that caused all of the radios and televisions to emit a loud sound the right frequency of the cold glass, causing it to break. The running theory was maintained by eye and ear witness reports who heard a loud, odd (people dared to call it monster-like) voice blare over the radio. Considering that everyone near a radio reported the same thing meant that yes, some weird frequency had gone about and caused all of this destruction.
There were also gaping holes in the ground on the road around Walt’s house. People reported seeing people fighting and throwing one another around the town, but Janice didn’t know about that. She doubted anything that spectacular would ever happen in the small town of Atkins, New York.
Janice pulled right up to the driveway and pulled in. Walt’s truck wasn’t there, and there was no indication of anyone living in the house in front of her. Also, all of the windows were in there, as though they had never broken. If there was any indication of something weird happening with Walt, it was that he still had his windows.
Besides that, the house looked nice. Janice stepped out of the car and over toward the house.
She still could be dreaming.
The front door opened. Walt walked out. His eyes had alertness to them, and his cheeks a color that she hadn’t seen on the man before. He motioned for her to get inside. Looking around once more, she walked up the step and into the living room.
Janice had the utmost respect for Walt. However, she expected his house to be just a strike or two close to being a wreck. An old man living alone in his house with about as much of social life as a graveyard didn’t leave much of an incentive for him to clean. The man always looked nice whenever he came in for coffee, or to pay for gas, but his house wasn’t him, and he could have let the place run to shit over the years.
But the house was clean. The furniture was all arranged, no duct or cobwebs littered the room’s interior. There was a lack of photos and any decoration, but aside from that, the house looked perfectly normal.
“People are looking for you, Walt,” Janice said. “You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?”
“No trouble for me,” he said. “Just going through something right now. Nothing too major.”
“You might want to tell the police that,” she said. “Half of the police force from here and Fulton-Montgomery County are looking for you.”
“The police wouldn’t want to hear anything I would want to say,” he said. “And even if they did, they wouldn’t believe anything I told them.”
“Well then, tell me, what happened on I-88.”
“Ignorance is its own kind of bliss,” he said. “Trust me, the last thing you would want right now is to be brought into the fold with everything.”
“I thought it wasn’t too major,” she said.
“It’s not,” Walt said. “But the boat is full right now. No reason to capsize it.”
The man could very well be crazy. Old man Walt, might have upgraded to crazy old man Walt, lighting his rest stop of fire and escaping in the night.
But Janice knew Walt and doubted very much that anything crazy or nonsensical was running through the man’s brain at this time. She just wanted answers, but the man didn’t seem too keen to try and provide them.
“I built this house,” Walter said. “Oh, maybe forty years ago. My cousin helped me, along with my brother-in-law. The three of us worked on the house for a whole spring and summer, working every day on it. Hell, we probably would have gotten it done sooner if we weren’t wasted out of our minds during the entire time. It was fun, though, looking back on it.
“There also weren’t so many houses around when we built it. All around here, it used to be a forest, before Atkins got some state grant money and decided to plow the forest down and incentivize business to build
