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somehow very close up at the same time. The voice uttered these two words: "I’m dead."
    I'm not bullshitting, I swear! And anyway, that's the story. And I'm delighted that Tom found this little oddment interesting enough to write a story about, a superb story to say the least.   The house is still there, by the way, and anytime I revisit Maryland, I toy with the idea of sneaking a tape recorder inside and making another remote recording. I’m certain, in fact, that one day I will.
     
    –Edward Lee, author of FLESH GOTHIC and MESSENGER

VOICE C
     

For Edward Lee
     
    J enks averted the cold spot in front of the foyer closet as he stepped into the house where his sister had been murdered.
    He hadn't expected a media frenzy and there wasn't one. Two reporters from the yellow journal city papers, a small crew from the local cable station, and that was it. The girl's mother, Mrs. Mallory, was doing all the talking, trying to nail down her moment in the spotlight. Her hair had been done up in a carefully constructed tower of braids and tails that threatened to topple starboard. The new dye job hadn't completely taken at her temples and it appeared that she'd tried to trim out the offending grays.
    She sat on a worn couch which was clearly set for the trash, large boxes stacked up before her being used as a coffee table. Paper cups and plates with half eaten slices of pizza littered the top. A couple of fold-out chairs encircled her and the two reporters were sitting, scribbling haphazard notes, looking weary as hell.
    The girl, Tracy, sat silently beside her mother with the micro-cassette tape recorder in her lap, eyeing the device with a mixture of disinterest and loathing. It was an odd fusion but she pulled it off.
    No one had noticed Jenks yet. He glanced around the nearly empty room. The house had gone through some changes in recent years but nothing too extreme. At some point the family had broken out a section of the far wall and put in a glass atrium. Jenks imagined they'd kept ferns and potted palms, maybe some Easter lilies in there surrounding a wicker breakfast set. It was the kind of room Jenks' mother would've liked two decades ago, back when his family had been living here.
    1529 Baldwin Boulevard. Even seeing the numbers on the mailbox made his heart rate pick up. The 'For Sale' sign planted on the lawn had tilted in the heavy wind, and the dead leaves swept over the front yard and piled into calf-high drifts. The neighborhood had been going to shit over the last few years but you just didn't notice it that much in the autumn.
    He stepped farther into the living room. Nobody looked up.
    They asked Tracy to play the tape for them once more. She didn't appear to want to. She wasn't nervous or even greatly annoyed, just detached, the way most teenagers seem to feel about everything.
    Tracy Mallory had a round face framed by coiling lengths of blonde corkscrew curls.   Little fresh girl pout with full peach lips. She had some meat to her, spread out in the right places, and she dressed to jiggle and bounce in a tight lace blouse, no bra, patched bell-bottom jeans. Boys would already be going berserk over her, wrestling each other in the halls for her attention. In three years she'd be voluptuous. In twenty, after a couple of kids, she'd be bloated and eyeing liposuction ads, busting the hump of her insurance agent to cover it as a health necessity.
    When Tracy refused to play the recording again her mother took it from her lap, fumbled with the buttons, popped the tape, stuck it back in, rewound but not far enough.
    He heard his sister's voice clearly. She sounded excited, anxious, with a hint of hostility. "What's that? Give it to me!"
    He'd heard those exact words perhaps a hundred times since he was eight.
    The story was getting older every day. Whenever someone else took over the house and wound up getting something on tape, the voices always said the same damn thing. Jenks was a bit surprised that anybody