Copyright 2020 by HisArpy
All rights reserved.
Reproduction or copying in whole or part without written permission from the author is expressly prohibited. All events and characters in this story are purely fictional and a product of the Authors imagination. Any similarities between any persons living or dead is coincidental.
Authors note: This story is 58,246 words long.
Chapter 1
There it was. That
tingle
on the back of my neck which always told me someone was staring at me. Glancing over my shoulder I could see my new neighbor standing on her porch, arms crossed with her usual disapproving expression on her face.
She was creepy and reminded me of Morticia Adams from the old TV show. Like the TV character, she always wore long, tight, dresses in black. I'd never seen her wear anything else except the black dress which covered her body completely from neck to ankle and contrasted sharply with her pale skin. Her long, straight, dark hair only added to the resemblance. Seriously, Mortica Adams was my next door neighbor. A neighbor who, apparently, didn't like me very much.
She and her three daughters had moved into the vacant house next door only a few weeks ago. As the only child of a single mother I'd lived here my whole life, inheriting my house from my mom after she passed away when I was twenty-two. That had been four years ago. It wasn't the best neighborhood in L.A., but my little cul-de-sac was quiet and usually safe. Safe enough so when I was a kid I could set up a telescope in the street and watch the lunar eclipse without having to have my mom drive me up the hill to the Griffith Park Observatory. It'd been a great place to grow up, friendly, happy, and everyone knew everyone else. This was my neighborhood.
Yet, despite the weeks my new neighbors had lived next door, I'd never talked to any of them. Other than her staring at me whenever I was outside doing things like putting out the garbage cans, or trying to get my truck to start on a damp Monday morning, we hadn't interacted at all, I only knew her name from some mail which had gotten accidentally put into my mailbox. Two white envelopes and a couple of mail order catalogs, all addressed to Katherine Black.
If it wasn't for the staring, I wouldn't think anything was different about them. They seemed to be okay, though mostly they kept to themselves. There hadn't been any kind of housewarming party after they'd moved in and I hadn't noticed any visitors or strange cars parking on the street either. Just her, her daughters, and the cats which had suddenly appeared after they settled into the neighborhood.
The cats were everywhere. Sunning themselves on the porch, walking along the top of the fence around my backyard, crouching in the flowers or under hedges, sauntering across the lawn with their tails held high, or sitting in the window of their house staring at me just like their owner did.
I didn't know how many cats there were, other than there was more than one. I thought there might be three of them because a couple had seemed to be smaller and skinnier than the other one. It was impossible to count them though because they were never together all at once and all of them were glossy black with yellow gold eyes and no other markings, collars, or tags.
Ignoring the urge to spin around and confront my neighbor face on, I kept leaning over the engine compartment of my old truck, trying to keep my tie from soaking up the dew on the fender. Let her stare, it wasn't like I could stop her. Besides, I was late for work. My truck battery was dead and I wasn't going to be there on time unless some kind of miracle happened. Experimentally I tested the battery clamps and cables. There had to be a reason the battery kept going flat overnight. It was new, but it was acting just like the old one and not holding a charge.
As I jiggled the cables, my fingers started tingling. Almost as if I'd touched a live wire except it wasn't a sharp bite, more like the buzzing of a transformer.
Was there an electrical short somewhere in the wiring?
I wiggled the cables some more and the buzzing tingle stopped.
"One more time."
Hoping against hope, I leaned in through the window and twisted the key. If it didn't start, I was going to have to call a tow truck and get a jump. Which would make me even later for work than I was going to be. It would also cost me money I couldn't really afford to spend. I wasn't rich and my job didn't pay as well as the glamor advertising for all those educational job-training schools said it did. Computer technology might be the career of the future, but it paid like the sweatshops of yesterday.
As I turned the ignition key, the starter engaged with a rapid stuttering sound, the engine barely turning over to the sound of the statico clicking. I held my breath and prayed it started.
C'mon, c'mon. Please! Start!
"Yes!"
I couldn't help the exclamation which escaped from my lips as the engine caught and stumbled its way into an idle. Closing the hood with a slam, I felt the warning on my neck again. Slowly I turned around to see Mrs. Black standing only a few feet away, a snarl on her face and her hands flexed to form claws.
"Good morning." Slipping sideways around the front bumper of my truck, I offered the greeting and opened the door to put both distance and a barrier in between us. Just in case she went from being a creepy neighbor to a demented serial killer.
Her eyes raked up and down my body as her hands changed from claws into fists. Abruptly she spun on her toes, the heels of her shoes tap-tap-tapping on the concrete as she quickly wiggle-walked in the tight dress back up her driveway and into her house. A slam of her front door punctuated the end of the entire scene.
Like I said, she was creepy.
"You shouldn't do stuff like that unless you want my mom to get really mad at you."
The voice came from behind me. Spinning I saw my neighbor's eldest daughter standing at the back of my truck. Like her mother, she wore black. Except, instead of a dress, she wore jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. All in black, even the rubber soles of her shoes were black. And, like her mother and sisters, she had the same dark hair. She wore it parted in the middle, letting it fall unbound down her back, just like her mother and sisters.
I knew she was the eldest because the other two sisters were still young enough to go to school. Occasionally I would see them at the school bus stop on the corner with the other neighborhood kids, their elder sister standing with them until the bus came and picked all the kids up.
"Do what?" I rubbed the back of my neck wondering how I hadn't known she was there.
"What you were doing. It's not very nice of you."
"What are you talking about? I was just trying to start my truck so I could get to work."
"Uh huh." The two words were heavy with disbelief.
"Whatever." I motioned with my hands. "Can you move out of the way so I can go? I'm late for work."
Before she could respond, her mother stormed out of their house shouting.
"Kathleen! Get away from him!"
"He's not doing anything mom." The daughter, Kathleen, obediently moved away from me even though she disavowed we'd been doing anything. "Honest. I'm shielding but he's not even trying to catch me. I don't think he knows how."
"He knows how. He was born knowing how." Mrs. Black grabbed her daughter's arm in a vicelike grip and transferred her eyes to me.
"Be warned,
Veneficus
, stay away from my daughters or pay the price for seeking that which you have no right to steal."
"What are you talking about? I'm not trying to steal anything."
Kathleen shifted to whisper into her mother's ear. Mrs. Black raked me with her eyes again before turning and heading back to her house, pulling Kathleen along by the arm. I watched until they both disappeared with another slam of the front door.
"Nutso. Definitely nutso." Getting into my truck, I backed out of the driveway already wondering what I was going to tell my boss as an excuse for being late.
"Dude!" Jason, my colleague at work, and the only other IT tech at the small server farm where I worked, was replacing a server blade for a customer's account when he saw me sneak in. "Where you been? The boss was here looking for you for some reason and I hadda tell him you were late."
"My truck wouldn't start." I explained what happened.
"I thought you fixed that."
"Me too." I looked over his shoulder. "Bad blade again?"
Jason nodded. "I don't know what it is about this account. The server just doesn't like it for some reason. This is the fifth blade I've had to replace this month. Every time it's been for the same reason; corrupted code."
"You erase and randomize the blade before you reloaded the software?"
Jason nodded. "Just like usual. I don't understand it. It's only this one account too. And only for me. It never does this when you do the updates or backups, only for me. I've even swapped for hardware from different clients and it still doesn't run more than half the time."
"What can I say, maybe the hardware likes me more than it does you." I sat at my console and opened a program window to look at the account Jason was working on. "Get that closed up so I can see what's happening when it boots."
Jason closed the lid on the blade and shoved it into place in the rack of servers. Using his thumbs he made sure it was seated into the connection plugs at the back of the blade tray and pushed the tray drawer into place so it wasn't sticking out into the aisle. The lights on the front of the blade lit up as it powered itself and booted. I watched in real time as the code started scrolling upward on my screen before it stalled, the little green light on my screen blinking at the end of a partial line of code while nothing else happened before the screen suddenly went blue.
"Anything?" Jason looked over my shoulder.
I shook my head no. "Blue screen."
"It doesn't make any sense. The blade runs when it not in the rack. I loaded the software and verified the copy. It ran." Jason scratched his scalp. "You think it could be a problem with the cables somewhere?"
"Let me look."
I got up from my chair at the console and pulled the blade out of the rack. Checking the cables and plugs for solid connection I wiggled the wires and pressed the connectors into their sockets. A sharp zap on my fingertips make me yank my hands away from the metal rack with an exclamation.
"OW!"
"What happened?" Jason was right there.
"I got shocked." I bent and started running my eyes over the power system looking for bare wires and broken grounding straps. "We need to take the entire rack off line."
"The boss isn't going to like that."
"I didn't like getting electrocuted." I went back to my console and started taking the rest of the server blades off line. "If the rack itself it bad it could be affecting everything. Gary won't like it if every account fails because our hardware killed all of them. Or worse by burning the whole place down in an electrical fire."
"The boss doesn't like anything that costs him money."
"Me either. But we gotta do what we gotta do or we're going to lose all the accounts anyway. Then we lose our jobs."
