Just Plain Weird Read Free

like him to lead me into a situation I’d never wanted to get into to begin with, and once in that situation, expect me to take the bull by the horns.
              “We were just--” I struggled to say something that wouldn’t sound too stupid-- “Well, we were just wanting to welcome you to the neighborhood.”
              The man considered this explanation, for what seemed an oddly long period of time. It was a simple explanation, after all, and yet he mulled it over as if it were the unified field theory. In the end, he seemed to relax into a sociable manner.
              “We moved in almost a month ago,” he said, letting the statement linger in the air so that I wasn’t certain whether he was expecting an explanation why it’d taken us nearly a month to welcome him to the neighborhood.
              The encounter reached a very uncomfortable juncture, and I promised myself to ring Raffles’ neck later.
              Finally, the man, who told us his name was Laughton, invited us in for something to drink.
              Wonderful, I thought, sliding deeper into a situation I never wanted to get into to start with. All Raffles’ previous statements about mass murderers and stalkers began suddenly to flood my mind. Given the oddity of the man’s behavior so far, the guy could have been a mass murderer. Well, you never knew. Maybe that was his method of operation: move into a neighborhood, and then never go anywhere, so that curious people finally came over to see what was what, and then they’d fall into his sinister trap, end up decapitated, chopped into various pieces, and buried in window boxes throughout the community. It could happen.
              He led us into the living room of the house, which was large and airy. It was pleasantly cool, which struck me as strange, because-- as far as I could tell, anyway-- the air conditioning didn’t seem to be running. The room itself was sparsely furnished, just a sofa, a coffee table, a television, an end table on which stood a plain-looking brass lamp that might have been antique or just designed to look antique. The furniture itself, however, was definitely cheezy. He motioned for us to sit on the sofa, but never offered to turn on the television, before he disappeared into another room. He returned a short time later with two glasses of lemonade.
              As he handed us the glasses, I couldn’t help thinking, Poison. Sure, poison-- either that or something to knock us out so that he might have his vile way with us-- whatever that was. I just couldn’t stop thinking along these lines, thanks to Raffles.
              It turned out to be, though, the best lemonade I’d ever tasted. Lemonade would never be the same for me after that day. I couldn’t pinpoint what made the taste of that lemonade so much better than other lemonades I’d had in my life-- after all, how many ways are there of making lemonade?-- but I could tell it was homemade.
              “So you boys live-- where?” he asked.
              I explained I lived next door, and that Raffles was over visiting me.
              “Yeah,” Raffles chimed in, at long last. “We were noticing that you don’t seem to go out much.”
              The man considered this. “Well, I am retired,” he said dully. “But you may be entirely right. I really don’t go out that much. I guess I’m a born homebody. I have my hobbies to keep me busy, though,” he added, a bit ominously, I thought.
              “Retired?” Raffles said. “But you’re too young, aren’t you?”
              The man chuckled, not above accepting a little flattery.
              “I’ve been very fortunate,” he said.
              “Stock market?” Raffles asked.
              “Patents, actually. I invent things.”
              “Anything we might have heard