It broke. Glass shattered around his fist, falling to the sill, falling to the floor around his feet. Some of it made its way into his flesh, sticking out from between his knuckles like the red-stained claws of some strange beast. Blood flowed.
Jerry barely registered the pain that surged on electric currents through his hand and arm. He stared at the window. Not the glass, but the window, the hole that was left behind.
The glass was gone. But behind it was still dark. Nonetheless, with the glass gone he could see that it wasn’t void beyond, it wasn’t a formless nothing waiting for some dark god to come and speak the words that would call forth creation. No, it was….
“What is that?” Sheri said.
Drew moved to the window, dropping the lamp he had been holding. “Looks like sheet metal,” he said, and rapped on the black material. It made a hollow, muted bonging. He nodded, then added, “Thick, too.”
Jerry turned to the next window. Heedless of the shards of glass in his still-clenched fist, he punched the next window as well. His blood spattered this time, splashing onto his clothes, the carpet, the window pane.
A thick plate of sheet metal behind this window as well. Jerry pushed on it. He didn’t feel any give. Not on the edges, not at the center. There was no sense that this was a thin piece of metal that might be forced off. Now he realized why the furniture had been cut apart: even the pieces might break the windows, but they would be useless to break through this. And Jerry felt certain that if he rushed at the sheet metal shutter himself, the only thing that would happen would be that he would bounce off and break every bone in his body.
“It must be bolted onto the house, or screwed on or something.”
He turned back to the family. Sheri looked like she had journeyed to a place beyond terror, her eyes darting from Jerry’s bloody fist to the metal, to the broken furniture all around, then back again to the blood coursing off his hand and pooling on the rug at his feet.
And the lights went off again.
30
The lights only stayed off for an instant this time, then they came on once more. But the illumination was short-lived as well. The darkness returned.
The lights flickered. On and off, on and off. Casting mad funhouse shadows that created not mere fear but also pushed Jerry into a place where the barest hint of sanity was a thing of memory, a pleasant remembrance.
“My pills.” Sheri’s hands were still clutching her shirt, spasming open and shut as though in counterpoint to the silent music of the flickering lights. “My… pills.”
She rushed out of the living room.
Ann glanced at Jerry, but then followed the teen out of the room without waiting to see what he would do, Drew at his mother’s heels. Jerry ran after them all, and it was as much instinct as thought: Stay together, stay safe, stay alive.
No overt threat had come, no direct strikes at their health or bodily integrity. Not yet. But he knew it was coming. It had to be.
The family rushed up the stairs, following Sheri who careened drunkenly down the hall, then into her room. She pushed into her bathroom. The lights flickered in here as well, though no one had ever turned them on in the first place. Someone had their hands on some master switch, and all the lights in the house were alternately ablaze and then dark.
“My pills, my pills,” Sheri kept murmuring. She went to the mirrored medicine cabinet that was built into the bathroom wall to the left of her sink. Pulled at it. It opened with a low creak.
“Where are they?”
The cabinet was empty. No toothpaste, no hair care products. None of the things that had stuffed that cabinet since Sheri hit puberty. The glass shelves held nothing, the space looked scrubbed clean.
Her pills were gone.
“Who moved everything? Where are my pills?” She started tearing into the spaces below her sink, the drawers to the side. Jerry could see all were basically empty. Only a few odds and ends, mostly consisting of feminine hygiene products, were left. No medicine.
Sheri stared at the other three family members, all of whom were crowded into her bathroom, staring at her. No one spoke. The teen girl started to shake.
Ann moved. She reached out, but Sheri shrank away as though fearful her mother was going to strike her.
“Calm down, sweetie,” said Ann. “I have extras in my bathroom.”
Down the hall like a cargo train they went. Only instead of any kind of valuable commodities, all they bore with them was fear.
Through the master bedroom. What Jerry had once viewed as his personal space now felt alien, the property of some invader that had stolen not just his possessions but his sense of self.
The master bathroom. Sheri was there first. As before Jerry watched with Ann and Drew as the teen girl tore into the medicine cabinets. Then she opened the drawers under the sinks, the small linen closet by the tub. Everywhere that might hold her meds.
It was all the same.
All empty.
The lights flickered again. They stayed out longer this time, as though syncopated to the ever-darkening mood that Jerry could feel pulsing through of him and his family.
“My meds. They’re all gone,” said Sheri. “They’re all gone.”
And then Jerry had a thought – more than a thought, a realization. And it scared him worse than anything that had happened so far.
31
“Medicine,” Jerry murmured.
“What?” said Ann. He looked at his wife, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were glued to Sheri as their daughter kept looking through the bathroom, searching and re-searching for her medicine, though it was painfully evident that everything had been stripped out of the bathroom.
Jerry didn’t answer. He was thinking of Ann, how she had looked so sick after getting out of bed. Of how he had thrown up, but only that thin trickle of bile had come out, like there was nothing in his stomach. He thought of the kids, both of them blinking and blurry-looking.
He remembered Sheri, looking around at the detritus that had once been their living room furniture and saying, “How could someone have done this? All this? In one night?”
“They couldn’t,” he said. “Oh, my God.”
He pulled back his shirt sleeve. The lights went on-off-on-off-on-off, but he could still see. Could see enough. Could see the crook of his elbow, the small black and purple dot with a dark red center. A needle track.
Now Ann was straining to see what Jerry was looking at. Jerry grabbed her arm. Pulled up her sleeve. A matching spot sat like a tiny tumor in the bend of her arm as well.
“What is it?” said Drew. The boy was craning his neck to look.
Jerry grabbed his son’s arm. “Hey!” shouted Drew, and tried to pull away. Jerry’s grip tightened, and he pulled his son close, pulled the boy’s sleeve up.
Needle track. Several, which told Jerry that they were dealing with someone who didn’t know how to place an effective IV – for what good that did.
Drew looked at his arm in horror. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
Ann’s mouth had sagged open. Now it snapped shut and she said, “Have we been drugged?” The words were low, contained, but they sent a shiver through Jerry’s frame. “How long were we asleep? What was happening WHILE WE WERE ASLEEP?”
Drew joined in as well, both him and Ann pelting Jerry with questions – what’s happening, what’s going on, when are we going to leave, what’s happening, when will this be over? – and all the while Sheri kept tearing through the bathroom. Finally she turned to the water closet off to the side of the bathroom itself. There was another small cabinet in there, where Jerry and Ann kept extra toilet paper.
Drew and Ann were still screaming.
The lights were going on and off, on and off, on and off.
Jerry felt like he was falling apart, pulling to pieces. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t think.
Sheri reached for the cabinet door.
Opened it.
The lights went
off.
On.
Sheri screamed, and Jerry had never heard a sound like it before. He knew that this was where it began. Not the fear, not the terror. Not the threat. That was all just in the mind.
No, this was where the danger began. Where the pain would start.
32
Sheri’s scream lingered, shredding the air like a sonic chainsaw, but after the first second it didn’t even register in Jerry’s mind. No, what he focused on, the only thing he focused on, was what had fallen out of the cabinet. The thing that had almost fallen on Sheri, the thing that now lay in a dark, sodden mass at her feet.
Socrates.
Jerry knew it was the family dog, but only because he saw bits and pieces that he recognized. A trace of fur, a line of the back. Other than that, the dog had been pulverized. Bloody, matted fur stuck up in dark, angry spikes along the misshapen lump of its body. His neck had been broken so severely that his lower jaw – what there was of it – now lay slack atop his back. His legs were all grotesquely broken in multiple locations, yellowed bone sticking out of the fur in spots.
One dead eye stared at the family, looking almost accusing, as though the dog felt vaguely hurt that they hadn’t taken better care of him. “Weren’t you supposed to keep things like this from happening to me?” the eye seemed to demand.
The rest of the face… Jerry turned away.
Ann found her voice first, after Sheri. She screamed. Drew did, too. Sheri backpedaled out of the water closet, falling against a counter and clutching at her chest. She knocked into her mother, who fell back into Drew. The three of them scrabbled backward, like a bizarrely conjoined triplet, until they hit Jerry.
He stopped them. Didn’t want to start moving back. Because who knew what was out there?
He grabbed Sheri. Pulled her to him. Held her against his chest. It was as much for him as for her. He tried not to look at the dog that lolled half in and half out of the water closet. At the mashed face.
What could have done that to him?
A hand touched Sheri. Drew. “Shh… shh…,” said the boy. The sound came out stuttered: “Shh-sh-sh-sh… sh-sh-sh-sh….” But Jerry was still touched that the kid was trying to help his sister calm down. She was in the most danger right now, there was no question about that. She could die right here, just die in his arms, and what would he do then?
“Sh-sh-sh-sh… sh-sh-sh-sh….”
Sheri was sobbing, her tears wetting his shirt through in an instant. “What happened to the dog? What happened to my dog?”
Drew stopped stroking her hair. He looked shocked. Or offended. “Who cares about the dog,” he managed to say a moment later. “What’s happening to us?”
And there it was. That was the million dollar question that kept popping up. And it was the one for which there was no answer.
The lights went off. This time they stayed off for a long time.
Jerry stared into the darkness. Stared where he knew the dead dog was laying. And he knew that it was there, not dead, not dead at all, no it was just in some other state, some state not alive or dead but merely waiting for the dark, for the black time. Then it would move. It would come for them, slithering across the tile floor on shattered legs, snapping at them with a jaw pulled apart and a face that had been removed from its skull.
The lights came on.
Silence. Only Sheri’s labored breathing told Jerry that life was still present in this room.
He realized that everyone else was oriented on the dog, too, and thought they must all have been suffering thoughts similar to his.
Sheri turned her face to him. She had a wild gleam in her eyes, like she was receiving all the information around them, but couldn’t quite figure out how to process it. “How are we going to bury him?” she said. “We can’t get out to bury him!” Her voice rose in pitch and volume, rose until it battered at him, cut him like an axe. “We have to bury my dog!”
Jerry looked over Sheri’s shoulder. Ann locked eyes with him. She nodded.
“We have to get out of here. Now,” said Ann.
He nodded. He took Sheri’s hand in his right. Took Drew’s arm in his left.
He started to pull them out of the bathroom. Both of the kids resisted.
“Where are we going?” Drew said.
“We’ve got to look for a way out.”
Drew looked at him with eyes that were every bit as wild as his sister’s. “But… what if there isn’t one?”
Jerry pulled them out of the bathroom. The lights went out again. He kept walking.
Pulling his family into the darkness.
33
They worked their way from top to bottom. First was the master bedroom. Looking for a way out.
The master bedroom had a doorway to a second floor deck. The deck had been a major selling point for Jerry when they bought the house: he had pictured him and Ann, sitting on the deck, sipping drinks and watching sunsets and kids playing in the backyard and enjoying the breeze and all the other things that said life was good. Of course, real life intruded quickly, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had even set foot on the deck, much less taken the time to enjoy a drink or a good book out there.
The door was sealed. The windows set in panes every few inches along its length were dark. Jerry drew back his fist to punch out a pane, but Drew grabbed his wrist.
“Dad, you’re gonna bleed to death.” Sheri nodded, and she sat him down on the bed and started pulling out shards of glass from his hand whenever the lights turned on.
Ann kicked out one of the window panes in the door. A hollow thock sounded as her shoe hit something beyond the glass, and Jerry knew the upstairs windows were enclosed by metal as well.
Sheri finished pulling the glass out of his his hand. The bleeding had slowed a bit, and Jerry marveled that he hadn’t nicked any major veins or arteries. But of course now that the glass was gone it hurt like hell.
Sheri pulled a sock out of one of his drawers. She closed it, and the entire bureau collapsed into pieces. Someone had sawed through this furniture as well.
Sheri didn’t say anything, just returned to Jerry and bound his hand in silence. It hurt, but it also seemed to calm her, for which he was grateful. More than grateful. He would gladly suffer a thousand similar wounds to keep his Princess safe.
He smiled at her. She smiled back. The grin was strained, but at least it was present. At least she wasn’t hyperventilating, so she’d pulled back a bit from the abyss of an attack.
Something clattered, and Jerry saw Drew pushing all the furniture to pieces. Ann was trying to hold him back, but he shook her loose. “Maybe he missed something,” Drew screamed. “Maybe there’s something he missed!”
Drew’s movements grew jerky. He ran out of the room, the rest of the family on his heels.
Drew’s room. Nothing there to help. His furniture came apart with anything more than a few pounds of pressure.
Same in Sheri’s room.
There was no way out up here.
Down the stairs.
Drew was snuffling. Trying to hold back tears, like he was attempting to prove to the family that he could be brave, could stand up to what was happening, could be a man.
Jerry felt strange, bringing up the rear. He felt disconnected. Like whatever was happening didn’t make a difference. As though the family had already been wiped off the face of the earth, and anything that occurred from this point on was superfluous.
The media center. No way out there. The remains of the Chinese food still sat on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and under the still-flickering lights of the house Jerry could see that the food had sprouted hairy green growths. Mold had risen in thick tufts along its length.
He remembered the way the food had tasted. Mealy. Chalky. Powdery.
Had they been drugged? he wondered. Was that how this had begun?
The living room carried nothing new. Just the shattered windows and the piled remains of once-exquisite furnishings. A remind
er of the dissolution of all that they were.
Kitchen. They found a flashlight, a weak beam that combatted the ever-increasing periods of darkness. The lights were less flickering now than turning off and only occasionally turning on. As though whatever madman was behind this could feel them falling farther and farther into the black pit of their own terror, and simply wanted the ambience to properly reflect the mood.
The flashlight cut a rapier slash through the black room. It reflected off the kitchen windows. No one bothered to check them. No one bothered to knock them out; to find the sheet metal that had undoubtedly been fixed behind the glass.
Strangers Page 10
