Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  The gloom and despair that had lifted when the family spotted Ted on the closed-circuit feed now fell over them all again, and fell harder this time. Misery always weighed heavier when hope’s corpse had barely cooled.

  Jerry searched for something to say. Something to do that would make a difference. That would save them.

  Good luck with that, Jer-Jer.

  “It doesn’t matter!” He blurted the words, less a conscious decision to speak than a need to act, to do. Inaction and despair had brought them here. It had to end. But when the family swung to look at him, faces a mixture of fear and hopelessness and defiance – the last aimed at him, as though daring him to figure something out – he felt his voice choke out. Felt himself wonder what could be done.

  He looked at the floor. His shoes. Anywhere but their faces.

  He caught sight of Drew’s arm. Remembered the needle tracks that had pierced their bodies.

  “It’s been days!” he said, and a warm blossom of hope bloomed again in his heart. Small, but could he coax it to grow? “We’ve obviously been in here for a while… maybe a week, maybe even more. People will notice we’re gone. From work, from school, they’ll –”

  A sound cut him off.

  It was a sound he knew, a sound he recognized. But in spite of its familiarity, he felt his stomach twist anew. Because the one consistency in all this was that the familiar was to be feared above all. A home had become a dungeon, a television had become a doorway to murder.

  And what he heard now….

  But he still moved closer to the sound. As he had to. And the family followed him, as they no doubt had to.

  And as the Stranger who was behind all that knew that they must.

  43

  Voices.

  He had known that from the first instant. Had known he was hearing words spoken. And had suspected – feared – that he knew where the words were coming from.

  It was only a few steps down the hall, past a closet door, his office door… then through the door that led to the kitchen.

  The voices grew louder.

  It was the phone, hanging on a wall near the basement door. It was active, its answering machine function playing back voice messages received on speaker.

  “Who turned that on?” asked Drew in a low voice. No one answered, except for Sheri who said “Shhh!”

  The voice was one Jerry knew. He couldn’t remember the name, but it was someone who worked at his hospital. Someone in HR?

  “… so we’re sure you’ll call us soon, and this is just a formality, we hope you understand. But if you do not return our calls or otherwise contact us, we’ll be forced to institute disciplinary actions, Doctor Hughes.” The voice paused, sighing. “Call us.”

  “What did that –” began Ann, but her mouth shut as the phone beeped and another message began.

  This voice was high and bright. The kind of voice that made Jerry want to reach through the phone and throttle whoever was speaking. The kind of voice that belonged to the kind of person who had decided she despised the universe and the best way to deal with it was to kill everyone with kindness. “Hi! This is Renee calling from the high school, about your kids. They’ve been absent since…” and the call paused to accommodate the rustling of pages as though in order to document and prove how hard Renee was working, “… last Tuesday, and we haven’t gotten the required absence excuse calls for them. Could you please phone us A-sap?” She giggled at that last word, then hung up.

  Beep.

  “Doctor, you are to consider yourself suspended as of now,” said the voice from HR, no longer careful or worried, only gruff and businesslike. “Please call us immediately, or you will face further action.”

  Beep.

  The family looked at each other. Jerry wondered if they were all feeling what he was: a desire to rip the phone off the wall, to stomp it to pieces and stop it from delivering its messages; and a conflicting need to hear. This was part of the Stranger’s game, he knew. And he suspected that to survive it they would need to know everything they could about the game and the rules by which they played.

  “Hi, this is Renee again!” Still chirpy as a bird. “We haven’t heard from you guys yet, and social services stopped by your place and saw the tent.” Her voice dropped to a tone that Jerry supposed was meant to sound conspiratorial – just you and me against the world, eh, folks? – but instead just made her sound like she needed to blow her nose. “Now, we know that emergencies happen and you guys probably found out about an infestation and left town until your house can be taken care of. Again, we understand emergencies. But please call us and let us know when we can expect the kids back. And remember that the tuition payments you’ve made are non-refundable.”

  Beep.

  HR. “This is totally unacceptable, Doctor. The board has agreed: if you haven’t called us back by five p.m., you will no longer be suspended, you will be fired for dereliction under the terms of your employment contract.”

  Beep.

  “It’s one minute after five,” said the faceless voice of hospital administration. “You are to consider yourself terminated from our service, Doctor. If you have any questions, please direct them to the hospital’s office of legal counsel. Goodbye.”

  The phone clicked and turned off. Ann snatched it off its cradle, her hand moving so fast it was a blur, then holding it to her ear as though trying to catch it while it still worked. But she put it down a moment later, her frown a clear announcement of the failure of that action.

  Jerry barely noticed. His legs wobbled. He felt like his knees had disappeared and been replaced by something with the consistency of Jell-O.

  “They cut me loose,” he said. His voice was stunned, tired. He had known they were in danger, had known life itself was on the line. But now he realized the Stranger wasn’t just after their physical destruction.

  He was trying to wipe them off the earth. To erase their existence.

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” said Drew.

  “What?” said Sheri.

  Drew pointed at the phone. “We send emails and Facebook messages and IMs more than we actually visit our neighbors. America is run by faceless corporations. And if you don’t show up, your coworkers don’t check on you, you just get a pink slip from HR.”

  Jerry looked at his son. Knew the boy was right, but didn’t want to admit it, not to himself and not to the family. Facing what was inside the house was hard enough; worrying about what might be left for them if they ever made it out would make the night unbearable.

  Sheri shook her head like she didn’t want to listen to Drew. But the teen boy just opened his mouth as though to resume his tirade.

  “Drew,” said Jerry, his voice weary but concerned, “stop.”

  Sheri was gasping. Short, quick breaths. Jerry was reminded of a fishing trip he had gone on once, a “retreat” for the senior surgeons in his department. One of them bagged a real catch, a four-foot yellowtail that took over two hours to haul in. When it finally lay on the deck, hook set deep in its now-shredded mouth, it gasped like Sheri was gasping now, trying to get the air it needed in a hostile environment. And failing.

  Jerry wiped his brow with hands that shook. “You’re scaring your sister, bud,” he said.

  Drew nodded, but it was as if he couldn’t stop. As if his panic had swollen to the point that at least some of it must find egress or he would burst. “No one knows anymore,” he whispered. “No one cares.”

  “Come on, sport, please,” said Jerry. He should have hugged his son. Held him. But all he could do was look at the phone. The phone that hadn’t worked, that hadn’t so much as provided a ring tone before. Not until now. Until the Stranger wanted it.

  The damn Stranger.

  “No one’s coming,” said Drew. He breathed out and in, a deliberate moment of preparation, then he said, “We’re all going to die.” And he said it not as threat or concern, but as prophecy. Like a seer describing a future he had already seen, a cours
e of events that must come to pass.

  Ann pointed the flashlight at her son. His eyes became dark pits, nothing but the barest twinkle at their bottoms to show he was anything more than a corpse himself.

  “We’re all going to die,” he said again.

  And Jerry believed him.

  44

  He said it again. Standing there in the thin beam of the flashlight, the only illumination in the black cave of their house. Standing like a corpse waiting only for its grave to be dug before it can lie down for eternal peace.

  “We’re all going to die.”

  Sheri started to whimper.

  “Drew!” Jerry screamed.

  Silence fell. Drew turned away from them all, staring at the blank nothing of one of the windows. But other than Sheri’s panicked breathing, Jerry thought he could have heard a moth flying through the master bedroom with the doors closed. It was a silence so deep it was nearly fathomless, a quiet so profound it bore with it a special kind of terror. One that Jerry could not bring himself to break.

  Luckily, someone else seemed to energize. Ann spoke. “We have to get out,” she said. “We have to get out of here.” She looked at the answering machine. The phone. Nothing behind it, only another length of the ever-constricting wall of silence and isolation that surrounded them.

  “We have to get out. We have to call someone.” Ann sounded like she was repeating a mantra. Like she was retreating to rote statements as a way of avoiding thought. “We have to call someone. We have to get out.”

  Jerry took a step toward her. “We’ll get out, Ann. We will.” He tried to sound more convinced than he felt; didn’t know if he succeeded.

  “We have to call someone.” Jerry realized that her tone was odd. Not just the repetitious nature of her words, but the fact that it… he struggled to figure it out.

  “We have to call someone.”

  There it was. He understood suddenly: she was speaking as though trying to convince herself of something.

  “Ann, we tried,” Jerry said. “The phones are all dead.”

  The lights were off, and Ann’s face was behind the flashlight she held, so she was almost totally veiled in thick shadow. Even so, Jerry thought he saw something, saw her face change as though she had just made a terribly difficult decision.

  The lights flickered back on. But they were dim, as though the Stranger had put everything on a rheostat and set it at half strength.

  Ann looked down, then back up. Jerry saw determination in her eyes. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Then she was gone.

  Jerry and the kids looked at each other, and he could see from their expressions that they were as baffled as he by what had just happened.

  They heard Ann trudging up the stairs. It was enough to break Jerry’s paralysis. And he heard Drew and Sheri rushing after him.

  They caught up with Ann at the top of the stairs. She was already walking down the hall, moving purposefully.

  She walked past Drew’s bedroom.

  “Ann?” said Jerry. “What’s going on?”

  Ann didn’t answer. She looked back at him, though, and he saw that her mouth had become a straight, thin line. She was such an attractive woman normally, but now she had become hard as stone, the small lines in her face deepening under the stress of some decision he didn’t understand.

  They passed Sheri’s door, too.

  Reached the master bedroom.

  The lights went out again. The family stopped moving, but the lights stayed out. Darkness lay behind them, an inky well that had risen up from a place of nightmare. Anything – anyone – could be hiding there.

  In front of them: the master bedroom.

  Ann went in.

  Jerry felt for his children. Held Drew’s hand in one of his. In the other he held Sheri’s.

  They followed Ann into the master bedroom.

  Her flashlight beam glinted off something. Jerry looked at it, then away. He heard Sheri gasp and figured she must have seen it as well: the huge pool of blood that had seeped out from the bathroom, soaking into the shag that began at the demarcation between bathroom and bedroom. The remains of Socrates.

  “Ann?” he said, in a voice that was pleading, practically begging. “Answer me. Please.”

  Ann didn’t speak. She disappeared into the walk-in closet.

  Jerry looked at Sheri. She was staring at the black-red puddle of gore in the bathroom. Drew was looking into the closet.

  Jerry yanked on Sheri. Not too hard, he hoped, but hard enough to jerk her attention away from the proof of violence just feet away.

  He pulled on Drew’s arm, too. And together, the three of them went into the closet.

  45

  It was a big closet – so big that Jerry had wondered how they would ever find the clothing to fill it when they had first bought the place.

  But with all the clothes, shoes, accessories, and bits of this-and-that accumulated through the very successful years, the addition of two adults and two teens into the space made it more than cramped. Jerry felt suddenly claustrophobic, and wanted to step back out into the master bedroom. Only the thought of the dead dog, the pool of blood out there kept him in the confined space.

  That, and curiosity.

  What the hell’s Ann doing?

  She was on her side of the closet. Jerry’s side was well-organized, everything in a specific place. Ann’s was more of an exercise in barely-contained chaos. It hadn’t always been like that, but had started only a few months after Brian’s death. She started dropping clothes on the floor instead of putting them on hangers, waiting for Rosa to clean them up or just leaving them there indefinitely.

  Ann went to one of the larger heaps, a mountain of shoes that would have put Imelda Marcos’ footwear collection to shame.

  She dug within the pile. For some reason, the sight of her hands disappearing into the mass of shoes made Jerry’s stomach clench. Like she was being sucked into the belly of a freakish monster that had been living under his nose without him noticing.

  She grunted. Then pulled something. The shoes scattered, drifting apart almost gently to reveal something that had been hidden beneath them.

  It was a box. Wood – mahogany, Jerry thought, though he couldn’t be sure. About twelve inches to the side, a few inches deep. Beautiful, obviously antique.

  So why was it hidden underneath a bunch of shoes?

  What did it need such an ornate lock for?

  And why had he never seen it?

  “Honey?” he said.

  Ann didn’t answer. Nor did she look at him as she pushed past the rest of the family and into the bedroom. Still holding the box, she knelt down beside the ruins of a vanity table that – like all other furniture in this house – had fallen to pieces. The contents of the vanity had scattered across the floor like piles of pirate booty. She aimed the flashlight at the bits of jewelry and perfumes, sifting back and forth until….

  “Honey?” Jerry tried again. “What’s in the box?”

  Drew and Sheri were silent, holding hands. They had the same question, he could see it in his kids’ faces. What was going on now?

  “Honey?” he tried one more time.

  Ann held what she had found among the remains of her vanity: a small brass key. She looked at it for a long moment, as though considering one last time whether the course she had determined to walk along was for the best.

  Then she moved. She plunged the key into the center of the box’s lock, almost stabbing at it like some monster she was worried might come alive at any moment.

  She turned the key.

  Opened the box.

  Jerry stepped forward, trying to see what was inside. Ann moved as well, angling her body in a clear attempt to get between him and the box, to keep him from seeing.

  But he did see. And wanted to scream and scream and never stop.

  46

  Letters. Each carefully folded, each one carefully placed upon the others, then the whole stack neatl
y wrapped in a looping coil of red ribbon, tied in an honest-to-God bow.

  Envelopes – presumably the ones the letters had come in – sat next to the pile of correspondence. They had been ripped open carefully, Jerry could see. Not to be torn, but treasured. Kept secret, kept safe in this cache of secret – hidden – love.

  “Where did all this come from?” Jerry said. He could see the kids out of the corners of his eyes, exchanging shocked gazes. He knew, of course. Knew what this had to be, but –