Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  But they were losing each other.

  So he had to move. Had to act.

  She opened the door to the room. Darkness beyond.

  He caught her in his arms. Held her tight, and unlike when he had held her in the kitchen, he concentrated on really being there for her. Not for her pain, not for her anxiety, but for her.

  He pulled back a moment. Smiled. “At least we never have to live through today again,” he said.

  Ann felt limp in his arms. She was letting him hold her, but wasn’t reciprocating. Jerry felt his own arms fall to his sides.

  He stepped away from her. Flicked on the light and entered the room. He sat on their bed. Dejection seemed to have hung leaden weights around his neck and shoulders, and he slumped under their mass.

  The bedroom was the biggest room in the house. Four-poster bed, gas fireplace. Attached sitting room with settee. Walk-in closet. And yet Jerry felt crushed by it, like the walls were closing in on him.

  Ann disappeared into the closet. He watched his wife go, silent, uncomfortable. He wondered if it would be better for him to sleep downstairs tonight.

  A moment later Ann reappeared.

  Jerry felt his mouth drop open so far he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he had dislocated his jaw.

  Ann had changed out of her clothes. And changed into something a great deal more revealing. A corset, purple lace panties and matching bra, and he saw now that what he had thought were pantyhose were really stockings, held up by a garter belt.

  She couldn’t have changed into that in just the short time she’d been in the closet, he realized. So that meant….

  Hope bloomed as he understood that Ann wanted things to work, too. That she hadn’t given up. Things were hard now, but they could get better.

  She walked over to him. She smiled, and he remembered the smile she had given him on their wedding night. She’d been wearing something similar, and that smile had been so hesitant, so loving and worried and excited and scared. “Do you like it?” she said. He’d never seen anything so beautiful.

  Ann kissed Jerry. Hard. He felt himself grow aroused. Put his arms around her.

  And then he felt tears wet his cheeks. He thought they were hers at first, then realized that he was feeling his own tears, that he was weeping.

  Ann must have felt the tears as well. Her embrace, so heated a moment ago, grew suddenly awkward.

  She pulled away.

  Tried to touch his cheek.

  He shook his head. Moved to his side of the bed.

  I’m not giving up, he thought. Not giving up. But I can’t. Not tonight.

  He yawned.

  Not tonight.

  A small part of him noticed that he was far too tired. Even given the fact that it was one year after his son’s death, even given the toll of the other problems he’d been facing – or avoiding – he didn’t think he should be this tired.

  He almost rolled over to talk to Ann. Then he thought he heard a low snore. Realized she must have slept as well. And that was wrong, too, wasn’t it?

  Then that thought floated away, born on a wave of exhaustion that pulled him into soft sleep. But it was a sleep tinged with darkness. A sleep in which he knew nothing, but even knowing nothing he knew that nothing was right.

  17

  The man watches.

  The house is dark.

  But he waits.

  He is patient.

  It doesn’t work unless he is patient.

  “What time is it?” he wonders. He looks at his watch and answers himself. “After midnight.”

  The house doesn’t move. Nothing moves.

  But a moment later he does.

  It’s his time.

  It’s his turn.

  Getting in is easy. It’s what he’s prepared for. What they begged him to do. So he’s walking through the back door a few moments later, after pausing to look at the pool.

  “So much sadness here,” he says. And then he says, “Yes, but we’ll fix that.” And he’s right. He’s always right. It’s part of why he talks to himself. Because no one else gives him the same amount of wisdom, of knowledge, of hope.

  Inside. The living room. The couch, the television – he’s never seen a house with so many televisions, one in every single room – the beautiful, silent baby grand piano. It is a lovely instrument, but in the darkness it hunches like a huge dark cockroach, and the man doesn’t like cockroaches.

  “I’m going upstairs,” he tells himself. And so he does. Upstairs is where the fun is really going to start.

  The stairs creak a bit as he walks up. He tries to step silently, but he can’t seem to walk with his usual stealth tonight. Perhaps it’s the excitement. Besides, he knows no one will be awake. He saw them all eat the food before the blackout curtains shut. They’ll be deep asleep. Just a pinch of the right drug on their Kung Pao chicken – more than a pinch, actually – and they’ll sleep for a long time.

  So will the delivery man he had to kill a few weeks ago to take the uniform and hat, preparing for tonight, but that couldn’t be helped.

  “Sheri, or Drew first?” he wonders aloud. And he answers, “The girl.” Again, and as always, the answer is the right one. She’s so lovely, so beautiful. Even though her beauty is like the beauty of a home that is riddled with termites and dry rot. Gorgeous, but spoiled within. He knows this because he knows her secrets. He knows all their secrets.

  Still, even though her soul is black, her skin is so soft.

  He goes into her room. She is asleep. Sweat prickles her brow. She moans as though gripped by nightmares. She probably is.

  Sheri moans again. One of his hands wipes the sweat from her forehead. One of his hands goes to her chest and lifts her blanket up higher to preserve her modesty.

  Then to Drew’s room. This room makes him uncomfortable. The rock-and-rollers on the walls seem to stare at him with accusing eyes, and the man wants to tear them down. His hand actually reaches for a poster, but he stops himself, gripping his own hand by the wrist. “Later,” he breathes. “Later.”

  Drew moans as well. The man kisses the boy on the cheek. “You’ll feel better soon.”

  Then into Ann and Jerry’s room.

  Ann is still as death. Silent as a corpse. She already is dead in so many ways. The man smiles. He likes dead people. Being dead is the closest thing to perfect that most people will ever be. No lies, no secrets. They are what they are and nothing more.

  Then Ann breathes deeply, and the beautiful moment is ruined.

  And ruined more when Jerry screams out in his sleep. A nightmare. He screams a name. Not the name of any of his children, not the name of his wife. But the man knows the name. He smiles.

  The secrets are surfacing.

  The fun has begun.

  He puts a hand on Jerry’s arm, rolling back the man’s loose long sleeve, exposing the crook of his elbow.

  “Remember,” he says, “this will sting a bit. But it’s for the best.”

  18

  Jerry lurched upright in his bed, and bit back something that could only be a scream.

  He’d been dreaming. Nightmaring.

  What was the dream?

  It was fleeing, even as the scream fell away from his lips. Nothing but images, confused images that withdrew from his consciousness like objects sinking below the troubled surface of a storm-darkened sea. He thought he heard Socrates barking. He thought he saw someone leaning over him, someone that split apart and became two versions of him, then became the girl….

  The girl….

  Jerry didn’t want to think about her.

  He wiped his hand across his forehead. It came away wet. Not just damp, not just a bit sweaty; it felt like he had gone for a swim.

  Swimming… another memory he preferred not to think about.

  He twisted to the side, then swung his legs off the bed and stood. The room lurched away from him and for a single confused second he thought he was on a boat. But no. This was his room.

>   Wasn’t it?

  He looked around. The effort of turning his head increased the room’s back-and-forthing, and suddenly Jerry felt sick to his stomach. He went to the master bathroom as fast as he could – not terribly fast, considering that his feet didn’t want to work and the floor had the consistency of a water bed – and barely made it to the toilet before he began retching.

  Nothing came up, just a thin slick of clear bile that burned the back of his throat. He dry heaved for what seemed like a solid year but was probably only thirty seconds, then grabbed some toilet paper and wiped at his lips before dropping it into the toilet and flushing.

  He lay his head on the toilet seat until he felt like he could move without vomiting again, then stood. The room started to tilt once more so he stood still and waited until things solidified around him, then slowly shuffled back to the bedroom.

  Once there, he saw a small light blinking on and off. He thought at first that it was just another aspect of whatever illness had assaulted his system, but then realized that the light was real. He squinted.

  “Ann!” he said. He regretted the outburst: as soon as he said it, he had to stop moving again as the need to vomit became almost unbearable.

  Ann jerked upright like she had been electrocuted. Her eyes were so wide Jerry could see the whites all around her irises, and her breath came in quick, sharp gasps that sounded almost painful. She must have been having a nightmare as well.

  She whipped her head back and forth, looking around frantically in the dark bedroom. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  Jerry pointed at what he had seen with one hand while he used the other to grip his forehead. “I think we overslept.”

  Ann looked at the clock. It was digital, with bright blue numerals that provided the only illumination in the otherwise dark room. And they were blinking on and off repeatedly: “12:00.”

  “I think we lost power,” he added.

  “What…?” said Ann. She got out of bed, then her knees buckled and she only saved herself from falling by grabbing one of the posters on the bed.

  “You, too?” said Jerry. He grimaced. “Must’ve been something in the takeout.” He swallowed thickly. “I thought it tasted bad.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “What?”

  Ann started for the door, wobbly but determined. “They could be sick, too.”

  19

  Jerry noted that Ann must have changed before she laid down. She was dressed in sweats pants and a long t-shirt. He was still dressed in the clothes he had come home in the night before.

  Ann slipped into a pair of tennis shoes on her way out the door. Jerry followed suit, putting on his own shoes. He wondered why as he did so – did tending to a pair of kids’ food poisoning require footwear? – but something deep inside him demanded it and he followed the mandate of his subconscious.

  In the hall, Jerry moved to Sheri’s room as Ann peeled away to Drew’s. He pounded on his daughter’s door, Ann hammering on their son’s.

  No answers to either.

  He looked at Ann. She was pale, her face almost aglow even in the dark hall. He wondered if he looked as ill as she did.

  By unspoken agreement, both of them opened their respective doors.

  Sheri’s room was dark and Jerry saw her as just a lump under the covers. He staggered over to her. Shook her. She moaned. He shook her again, worried that she might not awaken. He knew that was an irrational fear, knew that they probably just had food poisoning. But knowing it didn’t stop the terror that had gripped him. What if she was really sick? What if she was dying?

  Like Brian.

  “Honey,” he said. “Sheri, wake up.”

  Sheri moved. His heart stopped chiseling chinks in his ribcage as she sat up and looked around the darkness. She blinked blurry sleep away.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “The power must have gone out during the night,” he said.

  She frowned. As in Jerry’s room, Sheri had a digital clock that was blinking, sending on-off-on-off shadows through the cavernous space of Sheri’s room. The intermittent flashes made her look strange; alien. She was suddenly robbed of her beauty and made to look like a thing that should have died, like a thing that never should have been born. Jerry shuddered internally. He didn’t believe in omens, but the feeling that gripped him now felt almost prophetic, like he was looking at a vision of his daughter’s doom.

  “What time is it?” she said.

  “I….” He shook his head, trying to cast away the disturbing thoughts that had forced their way into his mind. He realized he had no answer for her. “I don’t know.”

  Sheri fumbled for something on her bedside table. A moment later a small square of greenish light appeared and Jerry realized she was looking at a watch. The light was enough to show her face clearly as she frowned.

  “What is it?” he said.

  She shook her head. Jerry took the watch and looked at it. “Ten o’clock?” he said. “That’s impossible.” It didn’t feel like ten o’clock. It couldn’t be that late.

  Could it?

  He moved to the window. A dark black patch in the greater darkness of her room. Moving like a blind man to get there, hands in front of him as though that might save him from falling. Luckily Sheri was a tidy girl – or at least, Rosa was a good housekeeper –

  (Rosa used to be, she’s not with us anymore she was fired….)

  – so nothing tripped him up as he made his way to the thick blackout curtains that covered every window in the house, thanks to Drew’s actions last night.

  (Was it last night? It felt so long ago.)

  He threw the blinds back.

  Still in her bed behind him, Sheri gasped.

  Jerry felt the world spin again. But this time it had nothing to do with whatever illness had gripped them all.

  20

  It was dark beyond Sheri’s bedroom window.

  But it wasn’t the dark of a cloudy morning, or even a normal night sky. No, it was the dark of….

  Nothing.

  It was like the world ended at the glass of Sheri’s window, like the universe had shrunk down to perfectly fit around the room, and beyond it was only the deepest black of utter void. Darkness uncreate.

  Jerry put his hand against the glass, a part of him expecting to feel unnatural cold or strange heat emanating from the window. Neither. It felt normal. Whatever the darkness outside signaled, it was something that did not intrude into the room. But nor did it allow for vision beyond its confines.

  “Dad?” Sheri said. The single word held a wealth of questions.

  Jerry moved his hands to the window latch and slipped it open. Then he put his hands on the ridge of the sill and pulled.

  The window didn’t move.

  He pulled harder. Then flipped the latch back the other way, just in case it had already been open and he had inadvertently locked it.

  No difference. The window stayed shut. The darkness beyond it stayed absolute.

  He looked at Sheri. She was huddled in the corner of the bed, her pale face still looking like a cadaver in the blinking light of the clock.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  Sheri nodded. Normally he would have been thrilled to have her agree with something he said and not put up a fight, but now it just made his stomach feel like it was coated with lead. Something was wrong. Beyond wrong.

  Maybe not, he thought. Just take it easy. Check out what’s going on with Drew. Maybe it’s just something easily explained.

  Then he heard Ann call out, “Jerry!” and her voice was terrified and he knew whatever was happening wasn’t over.

  It was just beginning.

  21

  Jerry moved as fast as he could into the hall, then to Drew’s room. The door was open. Drew was sitting on his bed, pulling jeans on over the boxer briefs he slept in, the light of a small lamp clamped to his headboard spreading a meager glow through the room.