Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  And then Jerry heard a sound he had heard before, had heard a million times. But he didn’t recognize it, because it was a sound that belonged to the real world, not this halfway place of shadow and death. He looked around and saw the same confusion he felt reflected in the eyes of the others.

  But then his feet moved. He took a step, then another. Then he was running, his body moving before his mind really realized what was happening, as though his muscles knew what was going on, recognized the noise jangling through the blackness the salvation it brought.

  Jerry ran. Ran through the hall, down the stairs. He heard the others behind him, and saw the flashlight bobbing along on floor and walls close to him, though the houselights stayed on and made the flashlight unnecessary for the time being.

  The sound came again. And this time Jerry recognized it, not just with his body but with his terror-soaked, fear-shocked mind. Sheri was saying something under her breath, and he realized what it was, and that she must know what the sound was, too: “Please, God, please, God, please, God, please, God….”

  The sound came a third time, and they were almost to it. It was coming from the living room.

  It was the phone. Ringing.

  59

  A moment later they were all standing in a rough semi-circle around the phone. It was on the floor where it had been discarded, and it rang again as they watched.

  The lights were still on, but darkness gnawed at Jerry. He had run here like his feet had known that the sound of the phone heralded deliverance. But now that he was here, he hesitated. Nothing had been as it seemed in this nightmare so far. The furniture had been pieces of wood held together only by the memory of what it once had been. The safety they had felt behind their gates and inside their walls had really been the false security felt by animals caged in a slaughter house.

  The people he thought of as family were really just stangers, secret-keepers who happened to live near to one another.

  So what of the phone?

  Jerry could tell everyone else was thinking similar thoughts. Because the phone kept chirping like a computerized cicada, kept calling for their attention, kept crying for them to answer… and no one moved.

  “I thought the line was dead,” Sheri said.

  The phone rang again as if to reply, but no one else spoke. Then it rang once more, and Drew stepped forward. He picked up the phone and hit the intercom/speaker button.

  Silence. Then the sound of slow, measured breathing, rendered strange and threatening by the voice-altering hardware that the Killer was using.

  Jerry felt like crying. Whatever hope he had been nurturing in the back of his mind that the phone had been calling in from the world outside this prison shriveled and died.

  “Please,” Drew said. A tear pushed its way down his cheek. “Please, let us go.”

  Breathing.

  Then a single word: “Disappointments.”

  “Please,” whispered Sheri, and she began to cry as well, “help us.”

  The lights in the house began flickering. Not the slow, almost languorous on-off-on-off that they had started with; they flashed so quickly it was almost painful, like an eon’s worth of lightning compressed into this room, this instant.

  He’s angry, Jerry thought.

  “What’s your secret, Drew?” said the Killer, his words coming out slowly and evenly against the violent backdrop of the lightstorm.

  Jerry looked at his son and knew that Ann and Sheri were doing the same. Drew backed away a step. “I don’t… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Breathing.

  Breathing.

  Drew looked at them all. At the phone.

  “I’ll kill you, Drew.” The voice was still strange, altered, but Jerry got the feeling that the person behind it spoke these words happily. With a wide smile on his face.

  Drew started crying. In earnest now, not a single tear but a flood of them pressing through eyes half-squeezed shut by guilt and fear.

  “The house was so empty,” he said. “It’s always been so empty.” His voice hitched and he sobbed. Jerry could see the violence of the night and the sour memories crashing on the teen almost visibly. He put an arm over his eyes, and Jerry couldn’t tell if his son was wiping away the tears, or hiding from everyone’s gaze.

  There was a snap. Jerry turned around. The TV behind them had turned on, just as it had to show them that they were trapped in a termite-tented house. But this time it didn’t show a close-circuit live view. The feed was grainy, but it was a recording.

  The angle was strange, high up and cornered oddly, but Jerry could see that he was looking at his son’s room. At his son. At Drew, with tubing around his arm, getting ready to inject himself with a hypodermic needle.

  Jerry glanced at his son. He felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. A dull ache settled into the center of his body, the center of his soul. Drew? A drug addict?

  A knock sounded from the television. On the screen, Drew sprang into action, wrapping all his paraphernalia into a tight bundle and then tossing it into the space below the loose floorboard beneath his desk. “Yeah?” he said as he put his gear away.

  “It’s me,” came a voice from the television, and Jerry almost didn’t recognize it as his own.

  The onscreen Drew threw the loose board back into place, tamping it down, then whipped out a textbook and sat down at his desk. He opened his window and fanned fumes away before finally shouting, “Come on in!”

  The camera angle didn’t show the door to Drew’s room, but there was the sound of a door opening, and then a moment later Jerry saw himself stepping into the room, standing beside his son, his perfect, good, innocent son.

  “Hey, kid,” Jerry heard himself say.

  “Hey, Dad,” the television Drew answered. “What’s new?”

  “Not much,” said TV-Jerry, “just a long day of ‘stickin’ it to the man.’ You?”

  The dull throb at Jerry’s center heightened; became an almost knifing pain. This had just happened. It had happened the night before all this began.

  The Killer had been watching them. And Drew had been lying for… how long? Since Brian? Since before then?

  He remembered looking at Ann’s and Drew’s arms in the bathroom while Sheri looked for her medicine. Ann had a needle track in the crook of her arm. So did Jerry for that matter. Drew, however… Drew’s arm had been riddled with marks. Jerry had thought that whoever was doing this just placed bad IVs. But now he understood.

  The TV turned off. Black and empty.

  The phone clicked. No more breathing, no more nothing. Silence.

  Jerry looked at Drew. So did Ann and Sheri.

  The house lights flashed. Faster, faster, faster. Like they were racing to a place where light died, a place where time ended and all was nothing and nothing was all that mattered.

  Drew was backing away from them. “What?” he said. Jerry thought he was trying to sound defiant, but instead he just sounded damaged. Broken. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He backed away from them, step by step. A stranger among strangers. Framed by the dark hallway, the lights that came on and off transforming him into a range of shadows and light, a caricature of himself.

  Then the lights slowed down as though exhausted. From onoffonoffonoffonoff to on-off-on-off-on-off to on off on off on off to on… off… on… off… on….

  “STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!”

  … off…

  … on…

  And Ann shrieked.

  “DREW!”

  Because behind Drew, in the hall behind the teen… was someone else.

  And the lights went off again.

  60

  Darkness is a funny thing, Jerry thought in the timeless forever between the end of Ann’s scream and the moment the lights came on again. It covers us, and we fear what it conceals. Then it comes away, and all too often we find that the light is far, far worse.

  There was a thud. A strangely wet
sound, one familiar to Jerry but he couldn’t place it before the lights came on again.

  And everyone was standing where they had been only moments before. Ann and Sheri beside Jerry.

  Drew, still framed in the hall. The dark shadow that had been behind him before now gone.

  Jerry heard Ann heave a sigh of relief, and was almost surprised to hear it, almost surprised to hear evidence of caring that had survived the night.

  Drew smiled at his mother, a lopsided smile that conveyed his own surprise to be standing after the lights turned on.

  Then Drew held up a hand.

  He touched his throat, and his lips puckered in confusion. His hand moved away, and Jerry saw it was stained red in the instant before a red line appeared on his son’s throat.

  The line only remained for an instant, an instant in which Jerry placed the wet noise he had heard, the familiar sound he now recognized from his own operating room as the sound of flesh being cut. Deeply. Then the red line disappeared in a gout of blood that geysered so far that Jerry knew there was nothing that could be done.

  Drew fell.

  Ann rushed to her son. Tried to catch him. Didn’t make it. Drew crashed to the floor.

  Sheri backed away from the hideous tableau, from the blood that was reaching crimson tendrils across the floor to her.

  Jerry didn’t move. He couldn’t. This wasn’t real. If he moved, he thought it might become real, but for now, as long as he stayed put, there was a chance it wasn’t, there was a chance it was all a dream, a horrible dream –

  “Drew!” screamed Ann. She clapped a hand on her son’s throat, a hand that almost instantly disappeared under the flow of red.

  “Oh, God,” said Sheri, her eyes darting up/down/left/right as she tried to take in as much of her surroundings at once as possible. “He’s inside. He’s inside with us!”

  “Help me!” Ann screamed. “Help me!”

  Who’s she screaming at? thought Jerry.

  You.

  Not me. I can’t move. If I move it’s real.

  He’ll die.

  Jerry felt his feet move.

  You’ve killed him.

  He tried to ignore the voice – the voice of impending madness that sounded so very much like his voice – and ran to Drew. To his son. Two steps, and he was running through sodden carpet.

  He knelt. Moved Ann’s hand away and clamped his larger one over the gaping gash that separated one part of Drew’s throat from the other. He tried to push the two halves together, knowing it was hopeless, knowing that there was nothing he could do and would have been nothing even if he had been in a fully equipped operating room rather than kneeling in the debris that had once been a living room in a locked-down home, but unable to stop himself, unable to stop trying to halt the bleeding, unable to stop looking at his son’s eyes as the teen thrashed under his hands, as the blood pumped out fast and fast then slow and slower then slowest of all then nothing and Drew was still, too, his eyes looking up at nothing, seeing nothing in this house, seeing darkness in darkness, and there was nothing left of him but a shell, just like there was nothing left of Jerry but the shell of what he had once been.

  Drew’s feet twitched.

  Jerry covered his son’s blood-spattered face with his own blood-covered hand. Closed the boy’s eyes.

  Ann fell away from Drew’s side, like his life had been a strange sort of gravity that had kept her clinging to him. As she fell she began weeping, and by the time she hit the floor her entire body was shaking with sobs.

  Jerry reached out to touch her. But his hand stopped in mid-air. There was no wall between them, no unpassable crevasse. There was just too much time. Lack of care had become something tolerated, then expected. The norm, and then habit. The empty space between them had filled with secrets that were now more comfortable to bear than the affection they had once had.

  Love doesn’t die all at once, or in big steps, he thought. It dies in tiny pieces, with daily decisions that nip off bits of it like the edges of a living branch until you’ve cut away to the heart of the trunk and then that, too, is gone and there’s nothing left.

  He let his hand fall.

  Just as well, a part of him thought. Your hand was bloody. Wouldn’t want to get her shirt bloody, too, would you?

  He knew it was ridiculous, but he took a strange comfort in the thought. He would keep her as clean as he could.

  Jerry looked away from Ann. He couldn’t spot Sheri, and a new panic attacked his terror-seized heart. Then he realized she wasn’t where she had been because she had backed away from her brother –

  (her brother’s body, not Drew, not anymore, just an empty costume that he used to wear)

  – as far as she could, pushing herself into the far corner of the living room, half crouched beside the sealed door to the backyard that might as well be another dimension. She was shaking, her face white. She looked like she wasn’t seeing anything in the room, like the horror of what had just happened may have snapped something small but terribly important in her mind. He thought there was a good chance she would never return from wherever she had gone; that she might be the only member of the family who had found a way to escape the house, if only mentally. And having done so, she might not be able to find her way back in, even if that meant she floated forever in a pleasant space beyond reality’s touch.

  I’ve lost all my children, thought Jerry.

  61

  As if she had heard this thoughts, Sheri’s eyes refocused the moment Jerry worried she might be gone for good. Refocused… and looked right at Drew, still laying as if afloat in a dark pool of twilight.

  Jerry almost jerked at that, flinching at the realization that this was the second son he had seen like this, body afloat, to be found and fished out by family. At least this time they knew what had happened.

  Small comfort that turned out to be.

  His thoughts turned away from his son when Sheri started to shake. She looked eerily like Ann in that moment, both writhing with the pain of the loss they felt. The difference with Sheri, though, was that Jerry could still go to her.

  He moved quickly, almost dancing over and around the debris and detritus that had once been the furnishings of their lives, jumping over to his daughter and grabbing her shoulders, forcing her eyes away from what lay behind him. “Don’t look,” he said. “Don’t look, Princess.”

  “We’re going to die,” she whispered. He didn’t think she was talking to him – or anyone in particular – and that added another layer to his fear. How far gone was Sheri? Her hand moved to her collar, and her breath hitched.

  “Easy,” he whispered. “Easy. We won’t die, sweetie. I won’t let anything happen to you.” Her hand was rubbing her chest in circular patterns now, and the last time he had seen that happen, she had ended up in the hospital. He had to get her out of here. Had to get them all out of here.

  “We’re already dead,” Sheri whispered.

  “No, we’re not.”

  “We are –”

  “No –”

  “Already –”

  “No –”

  “ – dead –”

  “ – we’re not.”

  Her hands tightened into fists, still at her chest. “We’re already DEAD, ALREADY DEAD!”

  Jerry reached out and touched her hands. He could feel heat pouring off her. She clenched further at his touch and he thought she might run off, might take flight into some other part of the house.

  He held her hands. Kneaded them, slowly opened them from fists and turned them flat. “We’re not dead,” he whispered.

  She looked at him, her eyes piercing, her terror insisting on hopelessness even as she asked for some hope. “Then what are we going to do?”

  “I….” He looked for something. Some way out. Some way to escape this trap, this prison. “I don’t know.”

  Ann was no longer sobbing. She was now crying more quietly, holding her motionless boy in her arms. “My baby,” she wheezed. “My bab
y, my baby boy.”

  For some reason, the sight of her mother’s despair was able to do what words of hope could not. Sheri stood up all the way, seeming to step out of herself as she stepped across the room to her mother. She held Ann. One of Ann’s arms remained holding Drew, but the other left the cold comfort of her dead son to hold onto Sheri.

  Jerry watched them, feeling glad that they found solace in each other, but also strangely jealous. His wife preferred the arms of a corpse to his own. His daughter would rather succor an adulterer than stay with a father who had remained faithful.