Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  He knew everything.

  Everything.

  55

  The tools were gone. Gone, but the tool board that had once housed enough tools to start a small hardware store was not empty. No, far from it.

  The screams petered out, but even the silence seemed to shriek, the nothing-sound battering at Jerry’s ears until he wanted to curl into a ball and put his hands over his eyes and disappear.

  But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was locked into place, the silence battering at him, his flashlight pointed at the grotesque sight that had greeted them when he opened his tool board.

  Rosa.

  The maid hung from the board, and Jerry could see what looked like thick loops of copper wiring wrapped tightly around her wrists and ankles, suspending her above the floor in a crucifixion pose. The wires bit deep – some of them disappearing into her flesh completely for an inch or more before resurfacing like some strange sea serpent in an ocean of flesh – testament to the fact that they were all that held the woman aloft. Blood caked the wounds in lumps that seemed black and insectile in the darkness, as if the body had vomited forth scavengers to devour itself in death.

  Her chin tilted up. Far – too far. It was at an angle that only someone in severe traction or perhaps a professional sword swallower could have achieved, and Jerry saw why a moment after he registered the fact that her face was partially covered.

  “Dad, what’s that on her face?” asked Sheri in a voice that shook so much she was almost incomprehensible. Then she apparently realized what she was looking it, for she began screaming again.

  The ladle. The one that Ann had said Rosa tried to steal on the night this horror all began. It was jammed down Rosa’s throat, the stem of the ladle pushed completely down her throat and straightening it beyond human capacity. Only the bowl remained outside of her mouth, partially covering it and her nose like a futuristic mask that might protect her from anything but itself.

  Rosa’s eyes could not be seen. She was too high up. But rivulets of blood ran in thin streams down her temples and into her sodden hair, and Jerry suspected that if he were to climb up on a ladder to look, he would see only empty and ragged pits where her brown eyes had once been. As though she had looked upon a deity of fearsome darkness, and like the people of the Old Testament, she could not be suffered to look upon her god and live.

  “What is that?” said Drew.

  Jerry looked at his son. Drew looked pale, whiter than Jerry had yet seen him, and so fragile. Jerry wondered how much of this kind of thing a person could put up with before their heart would simply stop, before they would just crumple or blow away like a dandelion seed in a hurricane.

  Drew was pointing at something. Jerry followed his son’s gesture and saw that blood had pooled below Rosa’s wired feet. The blood was black and brown, mostly congealed into a scabbed mass that looked worse than a wet red pool would have.

  Something – the thing Drew was pointing at – was in the center.

  “What is it?” Drew said again.

  “I don’t –” began Jerry.

  He looked closer. He twitched, and knew he was in shock. Don’t look at that, get the hell out of here!

  Where you gonna run, Jer-Jer?

  He leaned closer. It was a white and gray rectangle, maybe six inches to a side. Looked like it had been dropped in the blood, or perhaps dropped on the garage floor when the blood began to flow. Either way, there were streaks of brown-black-red crusted across it.

  Jerry leaned still closer.

  What the hell are you doing?

  I have to know.

  You already know.

  And he did. But he had to look. Had to see. In this place of darkness, he couldn’t stand to be blind.

  He saw.

  It was a photograph. Blood-streaked, gore-covered, but he could make it out, could make out enough. It was a beautiful woman, barely more than a girl. She looked to be in her mid-twenties –

  Twenty-three, in fact.

  – and was very clearly pregnant.

  Third trimester, Jer-Jer.

  Jerry was almost kneeling before Rosa, like a penitent before a dark Christus, a statue of rent flesh and flowing blood rather than cool, comforting marble. Now, looking at the picture, he felt his balance leave him. He reeled, the world spinning around, and almost fell forward. He put his hand down, barely avoiding putting it in the middle of the blood, dropping the photo into the gore, then pushed himself away.

  He was no longer aiming the flashlight and the beam whirled in the dark garage. A light that spun without rhyme or reason and turned already-fearful into still greater terror. He saw Drew and Sheri, terrified at his reaction.

  He saw Ann, and her face bore an expression for the first time since they had left the master bedroom. Her eyes drew together, twin pits of darkness. She had been distant, hiding from her guilt in some kind of shell she had put up in her mind. Now….

  Hands came under his armpits, steadying Jerry. “What is it?” said Drew. The boy – the young man – helped his father up.

  “Who’s that woman, Dad?” said Sheri.

  Jerry thought about denying he knew who she was.

  They won’t believe you, Jer-Jer. This was going to happen someday. You always knew it would.

  “Yeah, honey,” said Ann. “Who is that woman?”

  Jerry stared at her. He couldn’t believe the expression on her face. The rage, the betrayal. As though it wasn’t her who had been cheating on him. As though it wasn’t her who had brought a man into their home. As though it wasn’t her who had killed them all by calling her lover. She was accusing him?

  It’s the nature of people who are guilty to find others with blame. It’s the nature of humanity, all of us fallen and evil to some degree, that we seek a sinner upon whom we may cast the stones otherwise destined for us. Jerry knew that. But still, to feel it directed against him like this….

  “Who is she?” Ann demanded.

  Jerry felt… away. Like he was viewing all this on a closed-circuit TV camera. Like he was watching this the way the Killer must be watching it, close but outside of things. Someone who knew everything that was happening, but perhaps didn’t truly understand any of it.

  “I… I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. His mind felt fuzzy, like the gaps between the axons in his brain had expanded, inhibiting his thinking. He looked at the picture –

  Don’t lie, Jer-Jer, you know what that is.

  But how did it get here? What’s going on?

  – and then back at Ann in a motion that seemed to take years. She had her arms folded across her chest now, her eyes almost flashing in the darkness.

  “You don’t know what’s happening?” she said. “Isn’t that an easy answer.” She paused, then spat, “Just the way you like.” The fire went out of her eyes, and now they were flat and soulless as those of a serpent about to strike. “Do you think we’re stupid? That we can’t guess?” She looked at him. Waiting. Then screamed, “Answer me!”

  The noise echoed through the garage, and in his mind Jerry heard the creaking of the wires that bound Rosa’s wrists to the tool board. Heard her dead flesh struggling against them as she strove to rise in the darkness.

  He turned the flashlight on the maid. She didn’t move. The bowl of the silver ladle flashed brightly in the permanent midnight of the house.

  The ladle….

  A horrible thought struck Jerry. Too horrible to be true.

  And yet what was this night, if not just that?

  The ladle shone as it reflected Jerry’s flashlight beam. He started to shake.

  Too horrible. Too horrible.

  And yet….

  56

  Ann was screaming at him. Screaming now, screaming then. In the now she was screaming at him to answer, to speak to her, to answer damn it because she deserved that much so answer. In the then she was screaming about the maid, about Rosa stealing and about the ladle.

  The now faded from Jerry’s consciou
sness.

  Only then. “I shoulda jammed this thing down her throat,” Ann screamed, waving the ladle around in the kitchen while she raved at a level that frightened Jerry.

  Back to the now. Ann was still screaming, but he wasn’t listening. He looked at the ladle, the bowl covering poor Rosa’s face like some strange offering to Charon as passage to the underworld.

  “It happened,” he muttered. He felt the words fall into cracks between Ann’s shouted questions and epithets and demands, into a silent moment where they could be heard.

  Ann quieted. He turned to her. “It happened just like you said. Like you threatened.”

  Ann blinked, visibly taken aback. She clearly didn’t know what he meant by that, and Jerry wasn’t sure himself. He didn’t mean Ann had anything to do with this... did he? No. That was nonsense.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Ann finally growled. “Who is that woman?”

  Jerry felt the world snap back to full speed, and with it came rage. “Why should I tell you?” He stood, and moved to Ann, looming over her. “Why should you be the only one in the family allowed to have secrets?”

  Ann shrank away from him, which surprised Jerry, until he realized that he was holding the flashlight above her.

  Like a club.

  Jerry lowered it. Ann’s lip trembled, though whether from a return of the feelings of guilt she must be feeling or from fear he couldn’t tell. And he didn’t much care, either. The anger had fled as fast as it came, and now he felt strangely numb.

  He turned his back on Ann. “Why should you have secrets?” he mumbled again.

  And because he turned when he said it, he saw what happened next.

  Drew and Sheri had pulled closed to one another as though lashed together by a shrinking noose of terror. They had been watching their parents, Jerry was sure, but when he said, “secrets,” they stopped looking at Ann and Jerry.

  Instead, the teens looked at each other. A silent communication passed between them and a new kind of fear dropped over their gazes. Not replacing the fear they already felt, but rather adding to it.

  “Secrets,” said Drew. He said it so quietly it was less than a whisper. But Jerry heard it. Or maybe he just read his son’s lips in the shaking beam of the flashlight.

  Sheri’s face bunched up. Concern. Fear. Other emotions that Jerry couldn’t read.

  And then Drew darted forward. Whatever was happening was strong enough to cut the noose that held him close to Sheri. The teen threw himself at Jerry, so fast that he thought his son was going to attack him.

  Drew didn’t have mayhem in mind. Jerry felt his son’s touch, and though a bit violent it was far from vicious. Drew moved faster than Jerry had ever seen his son move before, yanking the flashlight out of his father’s grip and then running out of the garage before Jerry had time to more than half-register that his son was gone.

  In the next moment he felt a blast of cool air in the now complete darkness of the garage. Sheri. She was running, too.

  His children were going back into the house.

  57

  It seemed like a fully minute, but it couldn’t have been more than a half a second before Jerry coaxed his feet into movement. Then he was after them, following the bouncing – and rapidly diminishing – light that signaled his son’s location. He heard the thud of footsteps behind him and knew Ann had taken up chase as well.

  A silhouette in front of him. Sheri. Running up the stairs. He followed.

  Second floor. Hall.

  Where was Sheri? Drew? Jerry felt panic draw tightly around his heart, compressing it down to what felt like a tenth of its normal size, before he realized that Sheri was standing in Drew’s doorway.

  He joined her there. Ann was behind him, he knew. He could feel her, and suddenly realized that he was more aware of his wife than he could remember being. Ironic that the affection might die just when attention began to be paid again.

  Jerry looked into his son’s room. “What’s going on?” he said.

  Sheri ignored him. She was sweating, terror etching lines on her face that didn’t belong there, making her look much older than her years. “Hurry,” she stage-whispered.

  Drew ignored both of them. He was rifling through some of the drawers in his desk. Then, apparently finding nothing, he bent down. Jerry though he was going to open the bottom desk drawer, but Drew kept bending, kept reaching. The teen pried a loose floorboard up, revealing a void below, a black patch that was barely visible in the darkness that clutched them all.

  “What’s that?” said Ann from behind Jerry, and her voice sounded surprisingly normal and “Mom-like,” just a shocked parent finding her son’s secret stash. “What’s in there?”

  Drew aimed the flashlight down into the space. He put his hand into it, feeling around vainly.

  “Well?” said Sheri.

  Drew shook his head, rocking back on his heels as he almost moaned, “Nothing. Nothing. Whoever’s doing this knows everything about us.”

  Sheri rushed into the room. She snatched the flashlight out of her brother’s fingers, almost knocking him flat on his rear in the process, then shoved past Jerry and Ann.

  “Where are you going?” said Ann. She still sounded oddly normal. Like she had finally defaulted to a mode beyond panic, past terror. As though her baseline reset was “Mom Mode,” and she was now acting in the only way her programming permitted.

  Sheri didn’t answer. But Jerry knew where she was going.

  Of course he did.

  58

  Sheri tore between Ann and Jerry, then took a quick few steps through the hall, past the bathroom door, then to her own room. Just as Jerry had known she would. Drew had gone to his stash, and part of Jerry had been waiting for Sheri to do the same.

  Ann followed their daughter immediately. Jerry didn’t want to split up the family – he knew he was in shock, and not in full command of his mental facilities, but even so he wasn’t going to commit that classic bit of horror idiocy – so he darted into Drew’s room and grabbed his son’s collar, practically yanking his son with him as he followed after Ann.

  Drew didn’t make a sound. He looked like he was in a fugue.

  Jerry got to Sheri’s room just as his daughter was pulling a framed picture of some rock star away from her wall. Behind it, a section of the drywall had been hacked away, making a small hidey-hole.

  It was empty.

  “Oh, God,” said Sheri, with the same moaning inflection Drew had just used a moment before. She looked at her brother. “Everyone’s secrets,” she said.

  “What secrets?” said Jerry. He looked back and forth at the kids. They didn’t speak. Neither did Ann when he turned to her. She just glared, dropping back to the defensive posture that she had taken ever since seeing the picture of the girl –

  (So clinical, Jer-Jer, like you don’t know her)

  – frozen in blood at Rosa’s feet.

  “What was in your room, Drew?” asked Jerry.

  “Personal stuff.” Drew’s voice was low, sliding into the darkness and disappearing.

  “Like what?”

  “Does it really matter right now?” said Drew. He lifted his chin and stared at Jerry, and his gaze was the mirror of Ann’s. Anger masking guilt, guilt blanketing terror.

  And what was below that? Was there anything? Or were they all just empty husks at their center?

  Maybe the Killer couldn’t kill them, Jerry thought suddenly. Maybe we’re already dead.

  “Tell me,” he said to Drew. Drew was silent, defiant. “Tell me or I’ll –”

  “You’ll what?” Drew laughed, and it was a sound wholly unlike the usual chuckling that characterized his son’s merriment. The laugh was all hard edges and hollowness, the signal of a final attempt at self-defense; a last stand. “Ground me? Not let me go outside for a week?”

  Jerry opened his mouth, though he didn’t know what to say. The house, once his home, once his refuge, had become a place of terror and threat. His family
had transformed to a group of strangers, alien and cold.

  Then he didn’t have to speak. Because the lights in the house, which had been dark for what seemed like days – months, years – suddenly flickered on.

  Sheri gasped, and Ann put a hand over her mouth.

  The lights went off. Then on again. Off. Then on. And they stayed on.