No. Not Ann. She would never –
But look at this!
She couldn’t. She wouldn’t –
But she did.
Ann must have seen the flurry of emotions that gusted across his face, changing the geography of his visage from shock to disgust to horror and then back to shock once again.
“Now is not the time,” she said. Her eyes looked tired.
She put a hand to the letters. Moved them to the side.
“Please, God,” she said. “Please let it be here.”
Her hand clenched on something. She pulled it out. Opened her hand.
Sheri exhaled explosively.
Ann held a cell phone.
The sight of the phone changed something in Jerry. He didn’t know if it gave him courage, if the hope of a possible working phone gave him the strength to think beyond the fact that they were currently entombed in their own house; or if it was merely a sudden bloom of white-petaled rage that pushed at him. Either way, he felt his fists clench into tight, white-knuckled knots at his sides. Felt his breath coming shallow and fast.
“What the hell’s going on, dear?” he finally managed.
Ann stared at him, a strange look, like she couldn’t believe he wanted to get into this problem right here and right now.
But Jerry did. He did want to get into that. Because as bad as it was to be imprisoned in his own home, it was far worse to find out that he didn’t even know his closest cellmate.
“Please, Dad,” said Sheri. She was pulling at her shirt again, hands knotting as they gripped double handfuls of the fabric at her chest, then releasing for an instant before she started the process again. “Let’s just call 9-1-1 and get out of here.”
“If the phone even works,” said Drew morosely.
Sheri looked at him in horror. “What do you mean?”
Drew gestured, taking in the whole of the house with the motion. “Whoever’s doing this, whoever locked us in here… he kills our dog, he takes your pills, he kills Ted, he takes away every way we have to escape, and now… what? He’s just going to leave a phone for us?”
“He didn’t know about it,” said Sheri, her voice the pitifully small voice of the hopeless.
“I sure as hell didn’t know about it,” said Jerry. He didn’t sound hopeless. He sounded, he suspected, like he wanted to kill someone. Probably because he did.
Drew looked around at the mess of the bedroom. “Ten will get you twenty that the phone’s insides are missing, just like ours.”
And just like that, Jerry felt his attention snap back to the big picture. Whatever secrets Ann had could wait. For now. The important thing was to get out. Survival trumped the need to confront long-lasting lies.
Jerry, Sheri, and Drew all looked down at Ann. She had been looking at them as though waiting for their attention. Now, she moved her finger to the phone’s power button.
She pressed it.
47
Nothing happened for a long moment.
Drew made a strange noise, almost a sob. Sheri sniffed.
Then there was a different sound. A tinkling, chirping sound that Jerry didn’t recognize, but which must be coming from the phone.
It turned on. The phone was a model that Jerry wasn’t familiar with, but anyone who’d been born in the last fifty years would have recognized it as a fully-functioning, connected phone.
“Yes!” Sheri shouted. And Jerry felt so good. Not just at the fact that they had a means to call someone outside of this dungeon into which the Stranger had tossed them, but also at the simple fact that Sheri sounded animated again. Sounded like she might actually survive this night… and might actually be happy of that fact.
Jerry watched the phone. “Searching,” said the main screen. Then, “Connected.”
Ann pressed a button: “9.” Then “1.”
And in the instant before she touched the last “1,” the final number that would get them in touch with someone who could help, the phone rang.
The ring made Jerry feel like he had leapt six feet to the side… or at least like his bones had done so, leaving the rest of him an overly-fleshy bunch of blood and skin. Drew did jump a bit, and Sheri barked out something unintelligible.
The ringtone was a song. It took a moment for Jerry to place, but finally he recognized it: Whitney Houston’s hit ballad “I Will Always Love You.” He had heard it everywhere the year it came out, and though it was a pretty song, by the hundred millionth rendition he was seriously considering carpet bombing both Ms. Houston’s home and any nearby radio stations just so he wouldn’t have to hear it anymore.
Ann had always liked it, though. The song never grew old for her. She thought it was romantic.
And now it was singing out of the phone.
The screen on the phone read “Private Caller.”
The ringtone continued, the first few bars of the song playing over and over and making the dark space seem somehow stranger than it had before.
Jerry glanced at the pool of blood in the bathroom. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Socrates there, tongue lolling through what was left of his jaw, between what few of his teeth the Stranger had left him with.
Nothing. Just blood and tile.
“Mom!” Sheri’s voice was sharp. “Hang up and call the cops!”
Ann didn’t. She looked at the phone. At the children.
At Jerry.
Then lifted the phone to her ear.
48
Even though Ann was the one holding the phone, Jerry was close enough to hear it. To hear the voice.
To hear the Stranger.
But even as the thought entered his mind, he realized it wasn’t the right one. Whoever the person on the line was, it wasn’t a Stranger. Not anymore. It was something different. Something dark and terrible and deadly. But no Stranger. Because he had become far too intimate a member of the home, far too close to the family. He knew too much to be a mere Stranger anymore.
So what was he?
He’s the Killer.
The words came into Jerry’s mind unbidden, and he almost rejected them. Almost willed them away as being too much: if he thought of this person as the Killer, then wouldn’t he be ascribing too much power to him – or her? Wouldn’t he be essentially giving up?
No. Not giving up. Just facing reality. And you have to do that, Jer-Jer. Have to face reality if you hope to survive.
The Killer’s voice sounded strange, warped; clearly it had been put through some kind of sound modulator that had rendered it not quite synthetic, but no longer organic, either. The sound of a cyborg, something with all the failures of humanity, but the relentless nature of a machine programmed only to destroy.
“Your secrets will kill you all,” said the Killer.
Jerry saw Ann shake, the fist that she had made around the phone growing even tighter as the words were spoken. He didn’t know if that was because of the words themselves, or because of the mere fact of how close she was to the Killer. Certainly Jerry felt like giving up, like curling into a ball and waiting for the end. The Killer’s voice, even after being electronically altered, had a strange power to it. A siren song, a call to dash your soul against the dark rocks of despair.
“Who is this?” Ann said. “Where did you get this number?”
“What’s going on?” said Drew at the same time. Jerry realized that the kids couldn’t hear the Killer’s words. He wondered if that was purposeful; if the Killer had somehow known that only the parents would be close enough to hear his voice. “Who is it?” Drew continued.
Ann didn’t seem to hear Drew. Indeed, Jerry suddenly thought she didn’t even seem like she was in the same room as the rest of the family. She was there physically, but her eyes bore a faraway look, and Jerry wondered where she was.
And with who.
“I got the number,” said the Killer, “from the one other person in the world who knows it.”
Ann had been shaking before. Now her entire body seemed to twit
ch, a giant spasm that ran from her crown to her feet.
“Mom? You okay?” shouted Sheri, terror clear even in the pale beam of the flashlight.
Ann ignored her. Or perhaps didn’t hear her at all, Jerry thought. Certainly she wasn’t looking at Sheri – or anyone else in the room. Her gaze was faraway. Reserved for the person speaking to her on the phone, perhaps.
“What do you mean?” Ann said into the phone. Her voice trembled, skittering through the room like beads of oil on a red-hot frying pan. She glanced at the family, and Jerry thought he saw something familiar there. The look of a secret long-buried, a truth that refused to die but kept clawing its way back to light.
“Tell the truth,” said the Killer, and in spite of the electronic modulation his voice had undergone, Jerry would have sworn he heard a sly, sinister smile in the other man’s tones. “Tell the truth, and maybe you’ll live.”
Again Ann glanced around. Looked at her children. Her husband. Almost choking on the words, she finally managed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Silence. A long moment of absolute quiet, the complete absence of sound that comes after the gun has been cocked, but before the first shot has been fired.
Then the Killer spoke. “You disappoint me,” he said. Ann jerked at the second word, and Jerry felt like drawing away as well, as though the phone in his wife’s hand had somehow changed from an instrument of salvation to an alien creature that would bring only death. The word “disappoint” was one that meant something to the Killer, Jerry was sure. Something more than the meaning you’d find in the dictionary. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out exactly what that meaning might be.
The Killer spoke again, his words almost stumbling over themselves as he talked, like he had been holding this thought in for far too long and now that it had started coming out it would come out faster than even he could control.
“The man who gave me this number lied, too. He wouldn’t tell me his secrets. He was two-faced. Two is too many – if you have two faces you never know whose turn it is – so because he had too many faces, I took one of them away. Took one of his faces awaaaaaay.”
Ann gasped. Jerry was silent, not sure what he was hearing, but feeling the world start to rock madly below his feet. Sheri and Drew were yelling at Ann, he realized. Telling her to get off the phone, to call 9-1-1, to phone someone to phone the police to phone the fire departments to phone anyone….
“Mom, hang up and call the cops!” shouted Drew.
The Killer laughed. “And he screamed,” he said. “I took his face away and oh, how he screamed!”
Then there was the dry static click of a connection terminating.
Ann looked at the phone with a face that had no room for anything but horror on its features.
“Mom, dial 9-1-1!” shrieked Sheri.
Ann dialed.
But not the three-digit emergency number that would have called cops, fire safety officers, and a broad range of emergency responders to them. No, she dialed a ten-digit number with fingers so shaky it seemed impossible that she would get through the process.
And her children screaming – shrieking, pleading, begging – her to hang up and call the cops hang up and call the fire department hang up and call help hang up Mom hanguphanguphanguphangup!
Jerry watched. He felt strangely outside the moment. An observer. No, less than that. He was the man who had come in late to the movie. The guy who had missed the coming attractions, the opening credits, the first half hour. And now he could appreciate the spectacle… but could never hope to connect with the emotion.
Ann punched the last button on her phone. Hit “Send.” She put the phone to her ear and Jerry heard the double-beep of a connection.
At the same time….
Whitney Houston began singing again. Singing her hit “I Will Always Love You.”
For a moment that was too fast to be an instant, but which nonetheless seemed to encapsulate much of eternity, Jerry wondered why and how Ann had called her own phone. Then that nonsense, head-in-the-sand line of reasoning fled and Jerry realized he must be hearing the phone that was the twin to the one Ann had had hidden in her side of the closet. The phone that was meant as her phone’s one and only partner, it’s one true love and only reason for being.
Jerry’s skin felt cold. But for once it wasn’t the cold of fear, wasn’t the graveyard-chill of a ghost walking over bones not yet at rest, not yet at peace. No, this was the cold of a star, a deep ball of energy once massive and powerful but now swiftly collapsing into itself, its one remaining reason for being to remove everything else from existence. Other planets, nebulae. Sons, daughters. Cheating wives. And especially any phones that might have the arrogant presumption to sing “I Will Always Love You” while the husband was right there!
Everyone had fallen silent as the evocative strains of the out-of-place love song swam through terror-saturated air.
Ann was the first to move. Her motions were forlorn, and she wore an expression bordering on lugubrious reverence on her face. She kept the phone plastered to her cheek.
Jerry wondered where she was going. Then Whitney Houston began playing again and he realized that his wife was looking for the second singer in the strange, secret love song that had been going on without his knowledge.
He didn’t know how he’d react when she found the guy. He was pretty sure he was going to kill him. But would it be now or later? Hmmmmm….
Ann suddenly reminded Jerry of Socrates when the pooch was on the trail of a rabbit, or tracking down one of the gophers or rats that managed to get onto the property. He had a weird urge to rub Ann’s hair and say, “Gooood girl.”
The sound came on again. After only a few repetitions of the eponymous chorus Jerry was more than ready to never hear that song again.
Ann followed the electronic mutilation of the #1 Ballad. The lights still off, of course, so it was only the small flashlight in Ann’s hand that attempted to push back the darkness. And largely failed.
The flashlight beam followed the music, stitching a silver pattern through the thick black tapestry that had woven itself among all of them.
Ann was still holding the mahogany chest, the outward evidence of a hidden love. Now she put it on the floor (making sure the door to the chest was shut, Jerry noted) and waited.
The song came again.
Ann followed it with the lance of her beam. A twenty-first century Don Quijote tilting not at windmills, but at something Jerry intuited would turn out to be far more real and fare more deadly. No mythical dragons in this house. No, only lies and secrets and the death they brought.
The song stopped. Ann stopped moving as well. As perfect and pristine as she had been when Jerry married her twenty years before. She hadn’t changed.
At least on the outside. Though inside she was someone that Jerry didn’t know and might never have known.
The music started. Jerry caught a glimpse of Sheri and Drew, silent through all this. Now they shared a quick gaze with one another. And there were volumes spoken in that gaze, though Jerry didn’t have the vocabulary to understand the language they spoke.
Ann reached out. Reached for the master bed. Because that’s where the music was coming from, Jerry realized.
He also heard something in that instant. Heard the Killer speaking, remembered what he had said on the phone to Ann: “… because he had too many faces, I took one of them away. Took one of his faces awaaaaaay.”
He had a sudden unnamed dread, and reached for Ann’s arm at the precise instant she took hold of the dust cover, the bit of cloth that hung below the box spring and hid whatever was under the bed from view. As far as Jerry understood purchase of a dust cover was acceptable in forty-eight states as proof you had a vagina. No man he knew had ever stated a preference for a dust cover. Most men didn’t even know what they were.
Drew must have had a similar feeling, because at the same moment he leaped forward, screaming, “Mom, don’t –”
Jerry and Drew were both too late. The two of them moved as fast as they could, but Ann flipped up the dust cover and saw what lay below the bed. She saw, and in the next second her knees buckled and in the second after that she started to scream.
49
Jerry saw it as well. The flashlight in Ann’s hand slashed across it, and he was given the thinnest glimpse of a new Hell, one that gaped beneath the one the family presently occupied, but which was no less real for that fact.
Strangers Page 14
