Streetview

He logged on and clicked immediately to the Allview website.  He closed his eyes, gathered a deep breath…and then warily looked at the screen. 

Shit.

It was still there: the small elf icon on the lower right of the webpage. 

Not one of Santa’s elves or a Keebler cookie elf or a noble Tolkien elf, but definitely an elf. The elf grinned at him from the screen, as it had on Sunday. Yesterday, he’d found the elf a friendly symbol, a good-natured twinkle in its eyes, a dispenser of unasked for magic.        

On Monday he wasn’t so sure.Was that grin a smirk?    

At the top of the page, the website’s banner loudly proclaimed: “When an aerial or streetview isn’t enough!  See inside homes for sale, apartments for rent, visit stores, and MORE!”    

Allview wasn’t the first website to offer these services, but there was much more to its site, much more to its MORE…if you clicked on the elf.

The website placed you inside a car (it even gave you the choice of a make and model—nice touch), the camera view at the same level as the driver’s eyes. The car was placed at a starting point of your choice. The car drove at the speed chosen by you, wherever you wanted to go, well, almost anywhere. A click on the North Pole showed nothing more than a satellite view of whiteness—no dog sled waiting up there to drive you around. A click on Area 51 in the Nevada desert revealed a satellite view of nondescript buildings and runways at an Air Force base, nothing overtly extraterrestrial in appearance. Pyongyang got you nothing but a snarky comment attached to a caricature of Kpop star Psy: “Are you kidding me!” 

Most of the places he selected resulted in street level views, the same ones an actual driver would see: front, side-to-side, a look over either shoulder, all the images that the Allview cars captured during their data collection journeys. He’d seen these cars on occasion in his city, unmistakable because of the loud wraparound advertisement and the spaceship-like device placed on the roofs, which was actually a series of ultra-resolution cameras attached to a GPS stalk. With few exceptions, the cars managed to traverse and record most of the world’s roads, many of which were in horrible driving condition, from Timbuktu (literally) to Tinsel Town (ditto). Some of these roads were narrow and flanked by terrifying drop-offs, essentially roadways carved into the side of cliffs, which gave him a woozy vertigo before he could click away to something tamer.         

On Sunday he’d played around with it for hours. In addition to his own neighborhood and city, he visited Harlem, Compton, Paris, Seattle, San Francisco, and dozens of other places (yes, Timbuktu) as if he were a tourist dropped into their midst, tooling around and checking out the sights in person. 

He stopped at a few stores. By moving the cursor, the camera seamlessly left the car and entered the stores as if it were attached to his own forehead. Cool. Most of the stores he tried afforded this view, though some shots looked staged, since these businesses were largely empty, except in a few cases for a smattering of smiling employees. For the businesses where the camera stayed outside, he imagined a cranky owner telling the Allview guy to buzz off. One of these was Rubio’s Bakery, and he could well imagine cranky Mr. Rubio telling the guy to “get the fuck out of my store, you tech hipster!” He tried a few tourist spots, sometimes getting inside, sometimes not. Impressively, the camera entered the Space Devil Amusement Park and road the Devil’s Pitchfork roller coaster (more vertigo), as well as any of the other rides he picked. Smart advertising by those guys, he thought. Mr. Rubio could learn a thing or two from them.  

Just after 11 p.m., he grew bored with it. He had a long shift scheduled for the next day, and had foolishly given up a few hours of sleep. 

As he was about to log off, he noticed an odd icon in the lower right of the page, the elf. Had it been there all along? There was no nearby description to indicate its purpose, if any. Hovering the cursor over it provided no description, either. Hmm. He clicked on it nevertheless.

The page flashed several times and he found himself inside—

How could this be? 

His own car.   

On the left side of the dashboard, crammed into the corner, was the crumpled-up food wrapper he’d been too lazy to throw away this morning. An air freshener in the shape of Homer Simpson hung from the rearview mirror. The cup holder held a coffee mug with a faded university log—his alma mater. The odometer…how could this be…the numbers caught his attention when he arrived home that day…read: 100,001. “Hey, a palindrome.”      

The car…his car…sat at the curb in front of his house. Outside was deep into darkness—just after 11:00 PM. When he moved the mouse, the engine gave a throaty roar full of power and purpose absent earlier from the other cars…also unlike the sound his car was capable of making. Despite his shock, he proceeded.    

The mistake he’d made last night was going to Serena’s house. What a creep I am, he told himself, as he’d entered “1034 Tamarind Lane” into the search coordinates.  

The car didn’t drive there, despite him leaving the default speed unchanged (a comfortable 25 miles per hour)—time for reconsideration and backing out, he told himself. Instead, a tsunami of light, strobe-like, filled the car interior, and a moment later the camera was at a sidewalk, pointed at the front of…oh my God… 

He blinked, allowing his eyes to adjust, hoping it was a bad dream, wishing like hell it wasn’t. 

Except for a porchlight, the house stood in darkness. The porchlight clearly illuminated the numbers 1034. He didn’t think he touched his mouse again, but the camera moved up the walkway to the front door, smoothly and without hesitation. 

The door swung open, which startled him, and he moved his hands to slam shut his laptop. But he didn’t. His hands remained frozen, didn’t move at all. He felt his face redden and his pores explode with cold sweat. An erection suddenly poked through his boxer shorts, making him feel…dirty…dirtier…dirtiest.    

He’d been to Selena’s house a few times, for friendly barbecues with their other co-workers, and it was unquestionably her house. The picture of her family hung on the wall near the front door. Mom. Dad. Sister. Her. She definitely got the good looks in this family. A hideous umbrella stand, shaped like Frankenstein’s head, stood at the base of the opposite wall. As her cubicle would attest: She was a huge fan of Halloween. The hallway into the living room and kitchen, though shadowed in darkness, looked familiar. The stairway, which he’d never climbed, started off to the right, just past Frankenstein.   

How can this be?

He moved his hand far away from the mouse; it seemed like a rat now, large, hungry, and fearless. He took a few breaths, counting five seconds between each. 

Fuck it, I’ve come this far.      

He moved the cursor up the stairs—exhilaration trumping the creepiness of the situation, he admitted to himself. The laptop volume was on high and in the shadows off the hallway a refrigerator clicked on to faithfully start a cooling cycle. Somewhere behind him, outside, possibly several houses down the street, a dog barked a few times and stopped. He took a first step up the stairs…and stopped. A slight shuffle of feet on carpet seemed loud enough perhaps for her to hear. He moved the cursor, but the camera view would not depress enough to let him see “his feet.”

After a few seconds that seemed far longer, he continued up the stairs, slower, more deliberately, the padded steps noticeably quieter, but his heartbeat now loud enough to drown out any plaintive warnings his conscience offered. 

A faint snore came from one of the rooms, making him smile, and was followed a few moments later by proper, lady-like light breathing. A sheet rustled faintly. He was fully on the second floor now. The bedroom door opened, the camera moved into the room, and it…he…stood a few feet from the edge of her bed. 

She looked as beautiful as he’d fantasized she would appear under these circumstances.

Black hair spread out across a white satin pillow, a rich tide of dark ocean depths risen to sacrifice itself upon the shallows, gleaming in lustrousness underneath the faint light thrown upon it through the bedroom window from half a moon and a nearby streetlight. It was a blue-black tide frozen upon a midnight shore of pearly sand. One naked leg poked out from the sheets revealing a calf and delicate foot, the red nail polish on the toes inky black in the dimness. The leg, pale and smooth, hung suspended in air.    

He didn’t’ remember if he’d stood there, frozen in a mixture of perversion and fascination, for minutes or hours. Suddenly, a head popped up from the other pillow on the bed, and his heart almost exploded in his chest, a wash of sweat, sticky warm this time, erupted from fifty thousand pores.

Her cat, Spooky (yes, that was the beast’s name), looked straight at him, its eyes two yellow stars. The cat made no discernable sound, but Serena awoke and rolled over in its direction. It took every ounce of his strength to prevent his knees from buckling. 

“Spooky, what’re you looking at?” Her voice was raspy, not yet fully awake.

The cat ignored its owner. She rolled back over, looking straight at him. He almost screamed a pleading apology, but caught himself at the very moment he realized she was not staring at him, but instead through him. She yawned, and rolled back over, and stroked the cat’s head.

Spooky shook off her affectionate overtures, continuing to glare at him with primeval readiness.

“What, baby, there’s no burglar here? That’s my good guard cat, looking out for mommy.”

The cat continued its intense stare. Serena propped herself up on her elbows and gave another look in his direction, thinking perhaps she’d missed an elephant standing beside her bed, so intently was Spooky looking in that direction. 

“Crazy cat, momma’s going back to sleep…”

Tonight the elf wore a smirk without question…a sadistic concentration camp commander relishing the new arrivals. 

He knew what he wanted to see tonight, he gave up telling himself otherwise: Serena showering, perhaps masturbating if he was really lucky, that damn cat be damned. He imagined her moistness, her beautiful fingers, soft moans, and finally a crescendo of orgasm and skin slickened with sweet sweat.  

He entered her address and clicked—no hesitation this time.

Again the flash of light, just like last night.  

What the…?

The car was in front of his house. The address 342 screwed into the brick exactly like he knew it to be outside. He moved the mouse so as to move the car forward, away from this location, to Tamarind Drive goddamnit without any wasted time sightseeing; instead, the camera moved out of the car and…up his walkway. 

He froze…what was that? The front door opened; its distinctive creak as definitive as a DNA test. 

He moved the mouse back, frantically scrolling the wheel like a mad lumberjack at a logrolling contest, but the view stayed put. Then advanced a few paces to the bottom of his staircase.  

He moved the mouse any way but forward toward the stair, but the view advanced nevertheless—and stopped. A loud creaking sound shot into his ears. The camera continued up the stairs. A second creak, fully on the stairs, a far heavier sound than his own weight would make.

He almost fainted, a small dark blur ran past, up the stairs and stopped at the landing.  

The cat. Her cat. How did the bastard get five miles across town? Staring straight at the camera. And it had the same smirk as the elf…

A few more paces. His bedroom door moved inward, an inch, two inches, then paused. The view stopped just outside the door, near the antique mirror he’d inherited from his grandmother. The camera stood frozen for a few moments, and then his hand on the mouse, this time it moved as he directed it, turning it toward the mirror, revealing…revealing…

His scream was loud enough and long enough that several neighbors called the police.