Ann was standing at the window in Drew’s room. The curtains had been thrown back and she was looking out. Looking out at the same nothing that Jerry had seen through Sheri’s window.
She spun around as soon as Jerry came in. Pointed at the darkness behind her. “What’s happening?” she said.
“Does the window open?” he asked.
She shook her head, her frustrated expression clearly showing she’d already attempted that. Jerry tried as well, doing the same pull the window/flip the latch/pull the window/flip the latch routine he had done in Sheri’s room. With the same results.
Ann watched. She didn’t look irritated that he was trying the same thing she had already done, just worried – disturbed – when he failed to open the window.
A noise made him spin around. It was just Sheri, coming in through the jack-and-jill bathroom that connected her room to Drew’s. She had dressed, pulling her hair back in a quick pony tail and wearing the same outfit she wore before bed the night before. That stood as a true testament to how worried she was, since Jerry didn’t think it was permissible under United States law for teenage girls to wear the same outfits twice in a row. Boys might wear the same pair of jeans until the pants actually tried to flee of their own accord, but not girls.
Drew yanked his pants the rest of the way up. “Good hell, Sheri, can’t you knock?”
Sheri didn’t even acknowledge him. She just looked out the dark – no, the black, the blank – window. “What’s going on?” she said. “What do we do?” Then she weaved on her feet and had to lean on Drew’s dresser for support, one hand going to her mouth.
“Don’t puke in my room,” said Drew. Though the boy’s face was pale and Jerry thought it looked likely his son was going to vomit at any moment himself.
Whatever bug got us, it got us hard, he thought.
Out loud, he said, “Let’s just wait a second, and as soon as everyone’s up to it we’ll go downstairs and go outside. See what’s going on with the windows. Okay?”
He looked around. No one nodded. But no one dissented either. He wondered if they were thinking about what he was: what if there was no outside?
It was ridiculous. But just because something was ridiculous didn’t mean it wasn’t capable of causing fear. Just because something was ridiculous didn’t mean it couldn’t absolutely terrify.
Sometimes ridiculous things could even kill.
No, he thought. There’s an outside.
But it sounded like a lie, even in his own mind.
22
They filed down together. Jerry went first, holding onto the banister as he went down the long, spiraling staircase that led to the foyer. Sheri and Drew came next, almost holding onto one another. Ann came last. She was wild-eyed, looking around as though the darkness itself might come alive and take her somewhere beyond imagining.
Jerry flipped the foyer light on at the bottom of the stairs. The small chandelier was equipped with “soft glow” bulbs that were meant to emulate the dim illumination of candles, so it didn’t banish the darkness completely, but at least it pushed the shadows back a bit.
He looked at the rest of the family. They were all holding each other now. Gripping each other’s shoulders. He felt like the odd man out. Which he supposed he was.
Still, he put a smile on his face as he flicked the lock on the door. No question about this one. Unlike the kids’ windows, he had opened this lock a hundred thousand times. He knew which way the lock was pointed when it was open.
“All righty,” he said. “Let’s just see what kind of practical joke’s been played on us.”
He felt better. Partly that was because the sickness seemed to be ebbing. He wasn’t as nauseous, and the world didn’t tilt radically every six steps. But partly it was because he really believed it in that moment. This had to be a joke, right? No one woke up in a house in the middle of nothing. It was too incredible, too impossible.
Then the smile froze on his face and became an unnatural rictus as he turned the knob, pulled…
… and the door didn’t open.
The door was unlocked, he could see that clearly. He could feel the latch sliding back from the striker plate as he turned the knob.
But the door itself wouldn’t budge.
Ann saw him struggling. “Here, let me try,” she said.
Jerry moved away. Ann pulled a few times, then her hands fell to her sides. She looked at him through eyes wide with confusion and terror.
“Let’s go to the garage,” Jerry said. He tried to sound reassuring and confident, as much for himself as for her and the kids, but he heard cracks in the edges of his tone. Heard crevasses beginning to open in his self-control. Heard madness creeping into his reality.
He moved through the hall, past the kitchen and his office, then to the garage door. Something pushed past him halfway there. Drew. Panic was drawing jagged lines across the teen’s face, and he clearly couldn’t force himself to walk the way Jerry was doing.
Drew got to the garage door a few paces ahead of Jerry. He grabbed it. Turned the knob. Yanked the door. It rattled but didn’t open. Drew kept at it, jerking on the knob with movements that were almost spastic before letting go and saying, “What the hell?”
“Drew, language!” said Ann. It sounded like she was speaking reflexively, just a knee-jerk response. Jerry didn’t know if she even realized she had done it.
“It won’t open!” Drew whined. He sounded almost like a toddler who had been told his favorite treat would be withheld.
Jerry tried this door as well. There was no way it was going to open, he knew. But he had to do it. He couldn’t just let it sit there without touching it, without trying it. As though he was incapable of believing that he had found himself in this weird version of reality without verifying for himself.
Nothing. The door was shut tight. “What gives?” he muttered.
“Not the door, apparently,” said Drew, and laughed a crackling, jagged laugh.
“Da-ad,” said Sheri.
Jerry looked at his daughter. She was standing still, but he saw her hand move up, like she was going to touch her shoulder but then stopped herself. He felt ill again. Sheri, of all people, shouldn’t be in here. What if she had an attack? She had to get out. He had to find a way out.
“Back door! Back door, everyone!” he shouted.
Through the hall. Into the living room. The back door that opened into the yard.
Jerry pulled it. The last door, the last door out.
It was shut tight and wouldn’t open no matter how hard he pulled.
They were sealed in.
23
The second Jerry’s hand dropped from the back door, the mood shifted. Only a moment before, the tension in the room was almost visible. Now it dissipated, replaced by an even more cloying emotion: terror.
He looked at the family, then beyond them. The entire wall of the living room was essentially glass, a series of windows that stretched nearly floor-to-ceiling.
All covered by blinds.
He knew he should uncover them. But he didn’t want to. Because what if there was nothing outside them? What if they were alone?
Drew beat him to it. The teen grabbed a window control remote off a coffee table, then pressed a button.
The blinds pulled away from the windows.
One by one the windows were exposed. Six of them. Six dark eyes that gazed at Jerry with the blank stares of a line of corpses.
As with the upstairs windows, they showed nothing. No lights, no sun or moon. Just blank black darkness more fearsome than any vista imaginable.
The middle four windows were permanently shut, but the two on the ends could be cranked open to allow a cross-breeze to run through the house. Drew flipped open the crank and tried to turn it.
His face turned red and he grunted, “It’s jammed.” He exhaled then looked at the family. “Just like the doors.” He ran to the other window, finding the same result. “They won’t open!” Hysteria was ble
eding into his voice, tingeing in with crimson tones that bespoke worse things to come.
Jerry went to the middle window. He cupped his hand against the glass and looked against it. He probably looked like he was trying to see into a dim parlor on a hot summer day. But he was trying to pierce the darkness that had captured them. Trying to breach the void in which they found themselves suddenly swimming.
“What’s going on?” said Sheri. Her voice sounded small, childish. She had a hand on her chest, just under her collarbone.
Jerry had no answer. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said. Which was totally untrue, but what was he supposed to say? “Don’t worry, baby, we’re entombed in our house and floating in nothing but it’ll probably get much worse soon so we might as well enjoy the moment”?
Ann snorted. “Is that your answer to everything? ‘It’s just nothing’?”
Jerry did his best to let the reference to the night before slide, though part of him marveled at her ability to bring that up at a time like this. He looked away from Ann, and his gaze fell on the cordless phone that sat on a small desk near the wall. He picked it up.
“I’ll just call….”
His voice dropped away.
“What?” Ann said. “What is it?” He held the phone out. She took it, turned it on and off and on and off. “No dial tone,” she said.
“No worries,” said Drew. “I got my phone.” His voice was still a bit crazed, but he was grinning madly, his terror clearly converting to wild hope for a swift resolution to this situation.
He dug in his pocket. Then his expression changed from excitement to confusion to concern. He pressed several buttons, and Jerry could see that the phone wasn’t lighting up.
“It’s probably just out of power. Just plug it in,” said Sheri.
Drew didn’t make a move for the stairs. He pulled the battery compartment of his phone open. And his face changed. He took a quick hitch of a breath that was almost a sob.
“What is it?” said Jerry.
Drew held up the phone. Even by the ambient light of the hall Jerry could see that Drew’s phone had had its guts removed. There was no battery, no circuitry. Just an empty shell.
Sheri was already pulling her own phone from her pocket. Hers was a different model, a touchscreen without the buttons that Drew’s phone boasted. But when she tried to turn it on she got the same lack of response, and cracking it open revealed a similar void where the phone’s internal workings should have been.
Jerry ran to his office without a word.
“Jerry, where –” Ann began, but he didn’t answer.
His own phone was on the charger, just where he had left it. He pulled it off. Was it lighter than he remembered it being? He didn’t remember.
He began to turn it on, then stopped himself. What if it didn’t work? He ran back to the living room, as though by being among others their combined hope might force the phone into function.
He pressed the button.
Nothing.
Pressed it again.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing nothing nothingnothingnothingnothing!
And when he broke the phone open, working his nails between the seams that held the front and back halves together, it fell apart far too easily. The pieces fell to the carpet with a muffled lack of sound that was still somehow deafening.
Jerry’s phone was empty, too. Hollow inside. A shell that held nothing but false hope which dissipated when exposed to plain view.
“What’s happening?” Sheri asked.
No one answered.
24
Jerry pulled his eyes away from the empty plastic bits that had once been his primary mode of communication with others.
When did I stop talking to people? he wondered. When did I stop having friends that participated in my life, instead of contacts that just existed in my phone?
Then he pulled his eyes away from the phone. Looked at his family. They were staring at him like they expected answers. A solution. What could he give them? They were locked inside, the phones were out. That left….
“The laptop!” Drew practically shouted.
Jerry nodded, and again he headed to the office. But this time he flipped on lights as he went, as though every burning bulb contained the power to banish the evil that had invaded their home and made it something alien and hostile.
The family followed this time, moving so close he worried they might trip over one another. Afraid to be alone.
Jerry grabbed the laptop off his desk. At first he was relieved to see it there – what if it had been missing? – but then he was gripped by the certainty that it, like the phones, was empty inside. Hollow, just like Drew’s phone, just like’s Sheri’s. Just like –
(Just like you, Jer-Jer. Just like you and the family have all become: looking like people, but empty inside.)
– just like his own had been.
He flipped the laptop open.
It hummed to life, its drive spinning up from sleep mode and the screen coming on in all its sterile, blue-white glory.
Ann exhaled almost explosively. Sheri grabbed her chest again, and Jerry wondered how much of this she was going to be able to handle.
He grinned at her. Things already looked brighter – literally, now that some of the house lights were on. But with the electronic chime that announced his computer was ready for use, he felt buoyed up and reassured. Technology had become, he realized, not merely a tool, but a proof of life. No start-up sounds? Why, you might as well be dead!
Still, Jerry smiled at the family and swung the computer around so they could see the working screen with its familiar icons. They’d be able to email someone, maybe directly message the police… someone.
“Twenty-first century technology to the rescue,” he said.
Sheri gasped. Ann frowned, and confusion rendered Drew’s face nearly unreadable.
Jerry looked at the computer.
“What the…?”
25
The screen was gone.
The hardware was still there, of course, but Jerry’s homescreen had disappeared. Gone were his icons, his browser shortcuts, his desktop background picture – one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of his famous dissections, showing the internal organs of cadavers he had cut apart himself – all had disappeared.
In their place was a webcam view, whether live or recorded Jerry couldn’t tell. The cam showed a closeup of a woman, from the neck to the knees. The room behind her was obscured by shadow and blurred, as though the woman was all that mattered in this particular cyberworld. And Jerry knew enough about this kind of thing to know that, for her clients, she was all that mattered. For now at least, for the time it would take to feel like they had gotten their money’s worth.
The woman swayed. She wore a pink miniskirt and a blue tube top that seemed to stay on in direct defiance of gravity and physics. It was tight enough that it was painfully obvious that she wore no bra beneath it.
She began a striptease. Pulled her miniskirt down, inch by inch, revealing a thong before she reached up to her top and –
The screen flickered. The picture disappeared, replaced by a black screen over which the words: “Cannot find server. Internet connection unavailable,” appeared.
“What was that?” Ann said. Her face was curled with disgust, and Jerry shook his head. He knew his wife’s attitude about porn on the web. And he agreed with her, especially since he had had to do an emergency surgery some years before on a young girl who had come in beaten and sliced nearly to pieces after she didn’t turn in enough money after a night on the streets and her pimp took it upon himself to “teach her an economics lesson.” Porn, he knew, all-too-often ended up like that for the girls involved; and even if it didn’t, it fueled a massive demand that could only be satisfied by pressuring and even forcing women and girls to do things like they had just seen on the screen.
Nevertheless, he didn’t say any of that, or respond to Ann. He might
be disgusted, he might be upset. But he didn’t want to have a discussion right now, he just wanted out.
He tried to get rid of the error screen, but failed. Tried to reset the computer. Nothing.
Finally he pulled out the power cord and yanked the battery out. The laptop turned off, deprived of its power sources.
He put the battery back in and hit the “On” button.
Strangers Page 8
