Kerplunk!: Stories by Patrick F. McManus

Author:Patrick F. McManus
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-11-06T08:00:00+00:00

Bed-and-Breakfast

The white gravel driveway appeared to have been freshly washed and combed, and I wasn’t at all sure it was meant to be driven on. Maybe it wasn’t a driveway at all but one of those Japanese sand gardens, a work of art, really. It would be just like me to park on some guy’s Oriental Picasso. I imagined my old truck squatting in the middle of it, belching exhaust and dripping oil, and a screaming Samurai gardener running out of the shrubbery with a six-foot-long hedge-lopper. The image didn’t improve my mood.

I glanced uneasily at the house. Even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I sensed something sinister hovering over the place. It was all so, well, orderly.

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” Al Finley said. “It’s a perfectly lovely bed-and-breakfast.”

Finley, one of my regular fishing partners, is a former banker, very precise (read “persnickety”) about everything. It was easy to see why this place would suit him so well.

“It’s too weird,” I said. “This guy doesn’t know us from Adam, but for a few bucks, actually quite a lot of bucks, he invites us to spend the night, turns part of his house over to us. He’s gotta be crazy to do that. So right from the start we know we’re sleeping in a house with a crazy person. He could be an ax murderer! Probably got gullible houseguests like us planted all over the property.”

“Please!” whined Finley. “Just this once, pretend to be one of the species. It’s a B and B, for pity’s sake.”

We got out and walked up a white gravel path to the house, the gravel crunching quietly under our feet. There really was something creepy about the whole place: the neatly trimmed grass, the excessively tidy flower beds, the immaculate walks, the pastel pink siding of the house, so tastefully contrasting with the blue trim. Or was it the row of precisely spaced pots of petunias along the porch railing? Someone had to have got out a tape measure to achieve that kind of spacing.

“I don’t like it,” I said. Everything is so…so…so tidy! It’s unnatural. Gives me the creeps.”

“Combing your hair gives you the creeps,” Finley snapped. “Listen, I talked to young Mr. Jones on the phone and he seemed most pleasant, a very soft-spoken gentleman.”

“Soft-spoken! That’s the very worst kind, Finley! Soft-spoken has serial killer written all over it! Don’t you ever watch America’s Most Wanted? C’mon, let’s get out of here, before it’s too late.”

“No way! We’d forfeit our very substantial deposit!”

Ignoring my pleas, Finley rapped the door’s antique knocker. Edgar Allan Poe responded.

“Yesss?” Poe inquired. “What may I do for you gentlemen?”

Finley explained that we were to be paying houseguests for the next few days, while we fished the local lakes and streams.

Poe looked me up and down. “Indeed?” he said, as if recalculating in his head some silly mathematical error. “Well, come in, gentlemen. Oh, dear, and do remove your shoes. The carpets, you know.

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