So there he was in the second hour of Thursday, standing in her garden, facing his property, favoring her roses with a powerful stream of his finest in the mild summer night of the Oregon coast, when suddenly the air was filled with an electronic hum like the feedback from an enormous amplifier. At first the sound was the only phenomenon, with no detectable source. A crackling noise arose, as if a hundred yards of cellophane were being crumpled into a ball, which became louder than the hum. The lights went out. Then his house imploded. The front porch and walls and roof collapsed inward as if built of wet sand on a beach, imploded with such force that there might have been a black hole at the center of the structure, sucking it away into another universe. The crackling stopped first and then the humming. Perhaps fifteen seconds after the event began, it ended. Where his house had been there was now a mound of debris, its shape if not its size reminiscent of a giant anthill.
Harley Spondollar’s response to every setback in life—as well as to any positive development—was to curse it exhaustively, but in this case, obscenities and blasphemies failed him. Dumbstruck, he stopped raining on the roses and tucked himself away and, without any awareness of having taken a single step, found himself wading into the ruins of his residence.
Initially, disbelief repressed fear. He dropped to his knees and scooped up a handful of what was left of the house. Beads. Beads of various sizes—some as small as air-rifle pellets, others as big as peas, a few the size of grapes, mostly smooth. In the light of the moon, he couldn’t see them well. Some felt like wood, and others crumbled like plaster, and still others were as hard as metal. He realized there was no heat in the ruins, as might be expected, nor any dust. Mesmerized by the strangeness of the situation, he dug into the immense mound with both hands, searching for a nail or a screw or maybe a door hinge, anything that he would recognize as having been part of the house. He dug faster, more urgently, seeking an object, any object, that the house had once contained: a dish, a spoon, one of the DVDs from his porn collection.
Suddenly aware of a new alarming sound, he thrust to his feet and turned and swept the street with his gaze, but he realized that what he heard was his own desperate, ragged breathing. Disbelief gave way to fright and incomprehension. He was terrified, his grip on reality eroding. He faced the unknown, something mysterious, maybe occult. He had no interest in the unknown, no curiosity about it. To hell with the unknown. He wanted his house back. He needed everything to be as it had been throughout the evening: watching slasher movies, drinking beer, and pissing on the roses.
When he had been killing Viola’s rose garden, there had been lights on in a few houses along the street. Now about twice as many neighbors than before appeared to be awake, perhaps roused from bed by the loud hum and the crackling noise. He saw faces at windows. People were watching, wondering. Even in the dark, they could surely see that his house was gone, and they could most likely see him standing alone in the moonlight. Yet none ventured outside to learn what had happened. If he’d been anyone but Harley Spondollar, they might have hurried to the scene with first-aid kits and sympathy, might have set up tables on his lawn and provided casseroles and baked goods for an early we’ll-get-through-this-together breakfast. But he was who he was, and they stayed in their houses. That was all right with Spondollar. He despised the lot of them; there wasn’t one whom he would have invited into his home even when he had a home.
With the piercing wail of approaching sirens, a much-needed sense of reality returned to the night. A fire truck turned the corner, though no fire raged to be fought. Behind the truck came an ambulance with its emergency lights flashing, though no one had been injured. Close on the tail of the EMTs were police in three patrol cars. Spondollar despised cops, whom he considered to be nothing more than the enforcers of a tyrannical system.
None of these first responders had previously seen a house reduced to a mound of small beads. Although they were mystified, they began to wonder if Spondollar had destroyed his own home. He was obviously a victim, not the villain, at least not in this case, but the cops began to doubt him when he said that he’d stepped outside to enjoy the stars just before whatever happened to the house had happened. He couldn’t very well tell them that he’d been pissing on Viola’s roses. Apparently he didn’t strike anyone as a stargazer, for it was this claim that made them suspicious. In the face of the unknown, they strove to deny that anything inexplicable had happened, tried to hammer the fantastic into the mundane. The fact that he was a chemist intrigued them, though he hadn’t worked in that field—or any other—for years. No illegal methamphetamine lab ever exploded without a roar and fire, but they weren’t willing to let go of that ludicrous theory.