Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Jerry tossed a quick glance at Ann. “Yeah, when your mother called it instead of the cops.”

  Easy, Jer-Jer. Don’t let yourself lose it. Not now.

  Ann finally wilted under his gaze. Whatever anger had overlain her guilt evaporated for a moment and only embarrassment and a clear awareness of her transgression remained.

  Surprisingly, the fact of his wife’s apparent understanding of her blame didn’t make Jerry feel better. It just opened up myriad doors that led to black places in his own heart. Wondering if he had caused it, if he had driven her to it. If he had, in some way, been more guilty than she.

  You already know the answer to that little secret, Jer-Jer.

  Jerry looked away from Ann’s white face. From the fear-soaked countenances of his children.

  He walked to the bed.

  And reached under.

  52

  When Jerry was a little boy, his parents had an attic. Going into the attic had been a treat, an adventure that allowed him to roam through the dust-covered boxes that carried memories of grandparents he had never met; steamer trunks and other containers that seemed to belong to another world. The attic was magic.

  But all magic has a price, and for little Jerry, reaching up into the darkness, fumbling until he found the ball-chain that turned on the light… that was his price. For in those short seconds of darkness, anything could happen. Any monster could come for him, any demon could rouse itself from the shadows and pull him into a dark world where all was black and blood.

  For years that had stood as Jerry’s pinnacle of fear: the idea of reaching into a dark attic, a space full of hulking shapes and looming forms, knowing nothing and only hoping that the light was where it should be.

  Now, reaching under the dust ruffle of his bed, Jerry was a little boy again. A child crushed by the threat of the darkness, the promise of what it held. Mommy and Daddy had always told him there was no such thing as monsters… but they had never been sealed alive in the tomb of their own home. They had never been shut up tight in a place that had once been a castle but was now become a coffin.

  Jerry felt sweat prickle on his brow, felt salt sting his eyes as he reached out. He still held the flashlight in his other hand, but the last thing he wanted to do was shine it under the bed. He didn’t want to see those staring eyes, so large and accusing, so starkly white, couched in circles of raw red flesh that had had the skin pulled away in thin strips.

  He touched something under the bed. Something rough. He couldn’t figure what it was at first, then felt it move.

  “Ah, ah, ahahahah!” he shouted, and shoved back.

  “What is it?” shouted Sheri. She moved to him. Drew came, too. Only Ann stayed back.

  Jerry rubbed his hand against his shirt, against the floor. Trying to get the tiny touches to stop prickling against it.

  “Ants,” he said.

  Sheri gasped, and Drew made a strange sound that was half gag, half hiccup. Jerry felt like throwing up, too. But he couldn’t. They had to get out.

  He pushed his hand back under. The moving carpet of insect life had been invisible under the quick flare of light they had seen the man with before, but now each scavenger felt huge under Jerry’s fingers, the size of a cockroach as his hand quested over the unnamed corpse’s clothing, to his neck.

  Wetness. The ants were thinner here, but the wetness was worse. It felt like banana peel, and Jerry felt his muscles lock. He tried to convince himself it was just like any other surgery, just the feel of moist flesh under his hand.

  But that’s not true, is it. This isn’t a patient. This is a murdered man under your bed.

  He shuddered. Felt a damp knot of slime that he knew must be the putrefying remains of the cadaver’s flayed skin, peeled back from his face. His fingers pulled back again, but he forced them to return. Back to the cool wetness, to their search for the phone. He tried to think of what he was feeling in clinical terms.

  Sternal head. Scalene muscles?

  Flesh of the neck. Wet and red and cold and dead.

  Masseter.

  Cheek. Flayed and tissue thin. Peeled back from teeth that grimace in a fleshless smile.

  Then he felt it. The welcomingly inorganic angles of the phone beneath his fingers. He pulled.

  It didn’t come out.

  Jerry heard a noise, a sound that was half sigh, half sob. He opened his eyes – realizing only when he did that they were so tightly shut he had a throbbing headache – and looked around.

  Ann, Drew, and Sheri all looked at him. Close-mouthed, silent as terra cotta warriors. He realized the sound had come from him.

  He pulled on the phone again. Harder this time. It still didn’t come. He twisted, yanking the thing back and forth.

  A rasping slide whispered out from under the bed: the sound of a corpse being pulled along by the phone clamped in its jaws, like a strange fish caught by an even stranger lure.

  A part of Jerry’s mind, perhaps insane – or perhaps the only remaining sane part of his brain – whispered that it was appropriate. That a shiny cell phone was exactly the perfect lure to fish for and capture a man. He could almost hear Drew commenting on it. Drew, with his teenage certainty about the evils of corporate impingements on everyday life, the horrors of technological dehumanization.

  He laughed. The sound was sick and wet.

  Sick as an ant-covered shoulder. Wet as a flayed face.

  Jerry felt vomit bubbling at the back of his throat. He threw back his head and cried out. Twisted again.

  A pop sounded from beneath the bed. He suspected he had just dislocated the dead man’s jaw; had just widened the body’s already immense smile.

  But the cell phone came out.

  Something came with it. A gout of liquid. Jerry cried out, thinking it was blood. But then a wave of foul air rolled out from under the bed.

  Drew put his hand over his face. “Gah, what is that?” he said. Sheri’s face scrunched up as well.

  Ann remained impassive, as though she wasn’t even in the room.

  Jerry didn’t answer. Didn’t tell the kids that they were in all likelihood smelling the partially-digested remains of the dead man’s last meal, knocked loose by Jerry’s struggle with the phone and by internal gas buildup. He just wiped his hand and arm on the carpet, and then pulled himself out from under the bed and brandished his prize as proudly as King Arthur holding aloft the sword pulled from the stone.

  He had their means of escape. He had the dead man’s phone.

  53

  The moment of triumph lasted forever. Forever, and at the same time no time at all.

  Just like life, Jerry thought in that moment, that bright spot in the darkness that had pulled them into its deep maw. The good moments should last forever, and somehow they feel like they do. But then you blink and they’re over.

  He thought of Brian. Of his son, floating.

  Then he brought the phone down. He hit the “9” key. The others lit up as he did, and Sheri muttered, “Yes,” at the sign of the phone’s functionality. “1” was next.

  And the phone rang. That damn song. That song that matched the one on his wife’s own secret phone. “I Will Always Love You.”

  He glared at Ann, like the song was her fault.

  She wasn’t looking at him. Wasn’t looking at anything. Just stared into space.

  Jerry thumbed the red button in the corner of the phone’s keypad that would ignore the call. As he did he remembered that Whitney Houston hadn’t actually written the song. Nor had she been the first to sing it. She had just been the most recent singer to remix the ballad into a hit. He also remembered that Whitney Houston was dead. Died when she OD’d on drugs and drowned in her hotel bathtub. The thought sent a shiver down Jerry’s back, a quick shock of frozen electricity that ran from the nape of his neck to his buttocks.

  He started calling the cops again.

  And again the phone started ringing. “I Will Always Love You.”

  He glanced at t
he caller ID. “BLOCKED NUMBER.”

  He hit ignore. Started calling 9-1-1.

  The song started once more.

  “Call the cops,” someone shouted. It was Drew, but his voice was so high and crackling it could almost have been Sheri speaking.

  “I can’t while it’s ringing,” said Jerry. Or better said, he shouted it, his own voice rising more than a notch or two.

  He kept hitting ignore, kept trying to get a call out. But it wasn’t working.

  And after a few more tries, almost of its own accord his finger hit the green button, accepting the call. He held the phone to his ear.

  “Hello, Jerry,” said the Killer. As before, his voice was electronically shifted, warped and modified to something less than human. But at the same time, Jerry suspected that this was the real sound of the man’s heart: alien and ugly. “Put your wife on the line.”

  “Who is this?” said Jerry. He tried to sound brash and strong. And tried to ignore the quaver in his voice when he failed. “You let us out right now, or so help me I’ll –”

  “NOW!” shrieked the Killer. The single word came out so loudly that Jerry shouted as well, and almost dropped the phone. The word was a window: a clear view into the madness that held them. For an instant it was as though Jerry could read the book of the Killer’s mind, and in that moment he teetered on the edge of insanity himself.

  He walked to Ann, feeling wobbly and only partially in control of his actions. With every step what little sense of control he had maintained fell farther away.

  We’re never getting out of here.

  He looked at Ann. At her gaze into nowhere. He wondered what she could possibly be thinking of at a time like this.

  The man under the bed.

  The thought came like a crash of thunder that split his mind still further. Despair and hopelessness were now joined by rage. It was her fault. It was all her fault. It had to be.

  Had to be.

  He jammed the phone against her cheek, smearing the blood and gore of a dead man against her face as he did so. And as soon as he did the Killer’s voice rang out, again clear and loud enough that Jerry could hear it, though he doubted Sheri or Drew could.

  “I left your phone with enough juice to make a call after talking to me,” said the warped voice of the Killer. “Just one call. You could have called 9-1-1 and been done with this. But you didn’t call 9-1-1. You didn’t choose your family, you chose your secrets. You chose the man under the bed. And the result? Your phone is dead.” There was a stretch of silence. A moment of deathly quiet long enough that Jerry wondered if the Killer was done. But then their captor spoke again. Four more words that felt like a knife to the gut, twisted and pulled back and forth for maximum effect:

  “And so is his.”

  And with that, the phone Jerry was holding made a sound like a cap gun going off. Ann jerked her head away with a cry, and Jerry saw a curl of black smoke writhe through the air, a dark curve that dissipated almost instantly but left behind an acrid smell that made him wrinkle his nose.

  A moment later another sharp sound, the twin of the one that had just issued from the cell phone, came from the other end of the room. Something flashed in the darkness, and Jerry realized that was where he had thrown the first phone, Ann’s secret cell phone. So whatever had just happened was happening to both of the phones.

  He looked down at the phone he still held, the phone of the dead man. The LED screen was dark, and a large crack ran down its center. Smoke still curled up from the edges of the phone’s seam, and parts of the plastic looked melted.

  An explosive, he realized. And also realized that if the Killer had wanted, he could have been looking at the stump of his arm instead of the broken phone right now.

  “Dammit,” he whispered.

  He hurled the cell at the wall. It broke into four pieces.

  “What now? What now?” Sheri was saying. “What now? What now?” She whispered the words over and over, a litany repeated to whatever god might reach into the abyss of their damnation.

  Drew had his hands over his eyes. “This isn’t happening,” he said. Tears shone on his cheeks and Jerry was transported to the days when his little boy would run behind the couch and giggle, secure in the knowledge that if he couldn’t see Daddy, Daddy couldn’t see him. But he knew that whatever was happening to them would come for his son whether his son watched or not. Whether his son saw or not.

  He turned, finally, to Ann. And as he did so the fury he had felt before rose up again.

  This is her fault.

  No, that’s ridiculous. What did she do?

  What did she do? Who’s under the bed?

  You think that’s what did it?

  Her fault.

  Come on, Jer-Jer –

  HER FAULT.

  Ann looked at Jerry. He could see terror in her eyes. And guilt, shame for what she had just done. The Killer had been right: she could have gotten them out. She could have saved them. But she killed them instead.

  “Who’s under the bed?” Jerry said. His voice rasped out, snake scales across a bed of jagged rocks. “Why did you call him, Ann? Why in God’s name did you call him? WHY DID YOU CALL HIM?”

  Ann started to cry.

  Jerry looked at her and for the first time he could remember, he didn’t see his wife; didn’t even see the memory of her. He didn’t know what he saw. And didn’t care.

  He turned away from Ann, from the stranger in his bedroom, and walked out of the room alone.

  54

  “Dad!

  “Where are you going?”

  Sheri’s and Drew’s cries followed Jerry out of the bedroom as he stomped into the hall, moving like a Sherman tank toward the stairs. He didn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop. The anger had him right now, and if he let it release him all that would remain would be the terror that he could feel pressing at him. Pushing him. Forcing him back.

  He kept walking. A moment later he heard the light sounds of his kids’ shoes as they sprinted after him. He had known they would –

  That’s a lie, Jer-Jer. If you knew they would follow you, why are your shoulders unkinking, why are you letting out that breath you’ve been holding?

  – but he still didn’t stop walking. Nor did he stop when he heard a third set of footsteps. Ann. No, he especially wouldn’t stop for her. Not now, perhaps not ever again. You stopped for family, you helped your friends. But Ann was neither of those things. Not anymore.

  Halfway down the stairs now. The bright circle at the center of the flashlight beam bounced on the stairs before him as he moved at a pace that was nearly a jog.

  Easy. Don’t want to break an ankle.

  But he didn’t slow down. Couldn’t. For the same reason he couldn’t let go of the anger. Movement was survival. The one thing every dead man and woman had in common was this: they all were still.

  He had to move.

  A hand touched his shoulder. “Daddy,” said Sheri, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to the garage,” he said, biting off each word. Almost off the stairs. “I’m going to my tools.”

  He was in the hall now. He turned toward the shattered remnants of the garage door, the still-open frame beckoning. “I’m going to get my skill saw, and I’m going to cut a big hole through the wall.”

  “What do you –”

  That was Drew. Jerry cut him off. He stepped over the remains of the door. Into the garage. Darkness, broken only by his flashlight, which glinted off the cars’ chrome and the waxed floor. “And after I cut the hole in the wall,” said Jerry, “I’m going to get the hell out of here because I’M DONE PLAYING THIS GAME!”

  He screamed the last. Shouted it at the ceiling, hoping that the Killer heard him. Hoping that the sonofabitch heard and knew: he had lost. Jerry was leaving. They were all leaving.

  Jerry got to the tool closet. He pulled the latch open. Yanked the door back.

  And in the instant before the scream tore loose from his throat, he knew
the Killer had heard. That the Killer was everywhere and knew everything. He knew, but did not care. He was a dark God who could not be beaten, a creature with all power, holding fate in his merciless hands. A deity who existed only to destroy, to maim, to kill.

  Jerry screamed at what he saw. Screamed, and heard the children and Ann scream, too, a profane hymn sung not to the heavens, but to the darkest pit of Hell.

  The Killer had won again. He had known they would try this, just as he had known everything else.