Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

The TV finally stopped running. It went black, and Jerry felt like a mortally wounded man, held up by what he had been seeing. Now it was gone he sagged. The darkness inside him reared up, but he felt curiously weak. Barely enough strength to look at her. To look at Ann. The woman he had thought was his wife; had thought he had known.

  Ann backed away, her hands in front of her. She looked terrified, again as though he might hit her. “Honey, it wasn’t what it looked like, it –”

  Jerry felt strength flood his muscles. “It wasn’t what it looks like?” he said. He laughed, a single bark of a laugh. He had thought people only said things like that in movies. Then he returned his eyes to her, and felt hatred pouring through his gaze. “In our house,” he said, his voice low and almost deadly. “With our children down the hall –”

  Then Ann stood up, fighting back, and he saw a year’s worth of stored anger and grief finally finding egress. “Yes, in this house!” she shrieked. “This tomb you’ve made of our home, this wall you’ve built between us. Between you and me… between you and the kids.”

  That stopped Jerry’s righteous rage in its tracks, faster than any attack by the Killer could have done. He stared at Ann, aware that she was far from being in the right, but just as aware that wherever she was, she had plenty of company.

  He didn’t know what to say. Now didn’t seem like the time to tell her what had really begun the family’s dissolution. Not the time to tell her that it hadn’t begun with the Killer, or even with Brian.

  He turned away.

  Now was not the time.

  Later. If there was a later.

  64

  Jerry began throwing open drawers, moving around the kitchen as he did so and quickly verifying that all held the same thing: practically nothing. A few spoons, but not much more. Certainly nothing to threaten a madman, nothing that could be used to reclaim his daughter, the only person he felt like he had left in the family.

  “Shit,” he muttered. He looked at the spot on the kitchen counter where a knife block had sat since they had lived in this house. It was empty. Of course. “Shit shit shit.”

  He felt something on his arm and jumped. Looked over and saw Ann. Her hand on his arm. Her face was tear-streaked, and there was something new in her eyes. Contrition? He wasn’t sure. Didn’t care. Sheri. Sheri was all that mattered. He tried to shake Ann’s hand off his arm, but she held tight.

  He wondered how differently this nightmare would have played out if she had held to him this tightly before.

  That’s neither here nor there, Jer-Jer.

  He tried to shake her hand off once more. And once more she wouldn’t budge. “Jerry,” she whispered urgently. “Jerry, he’s trying to get between us so we can’t help Sheri, so we –”

  “Shut up,” he said. The words came out between gritted teeth. He opened the cabinets beneath the sink. Empty. Not even dish soap. “My daughter is out there, and I don’t have time to deal with you right now, you two-faced….”

  He stood up and walked away without finishing the sentence. Part of him whispered that was just because he had looked everywhere that weapons might be found. Time was ticking. They had to look for Sheri, prepared or not.

  But the rest of him – most of him – knew the truth. Knew that he couldn’t yell at Ann, or even get too angry at her for her betrayal. Because he had caused it. He had been the one who betrayed her first.

  That girl, Jer-Jer. Just tell her about the girl in the picture.

  No time. Gotta help Sheri.

  He could almost believe it was true.

  He walked out of the kitchen. Ann followed, her footsteps light behind him. He was glad to have her there, at his back. Glad as he hadn’t been for a long time. She was watching, helping. There were problems, there were lies, but in this moment at least they had a single common purpose.

  It felt good.

  Jerry walked into the hall. It felt like the darkness had weight and presence, like he had to physically push against it in order to proceed. He wondered how many steps he would be able to take, how many feet he would be able to walk, before he just collapsed in exhaustion from the stress and strain of holding the darkness at bay.

  You’ll go as long as you have to. As long as it takes.

  He thought he heard something. Glanced back at Ann. She looked askance at him; she clearly hadn’t heard it.

  He swung the flashlight back in front of them, realizing as he turned what the sound had been.

  When Brian was born, he and Ann had been the typical, nervous first-time parents. They ran to him at every sound, at every cry. And after a while they both started hearing him cry even when he wasn’t crying; when he was playing quietly or fast asleep. They laughed about it, about the “ghost cries” that were nothing more than the anxieties of new parents manifesting themselves in sounds that weren’t really there.

  Now, the ghost cries weren’t of a baby that needed feeding or changing. They were of a daughter who was being tortured, maimed, raped… the list went on and on. His Princess, violated and demeaned and ripped apart.

  Ghost cries.

  He heard another one as he completed his turn. And managed to ignore it, managed to recognize it for what it was.

  I’m going crazy. Going mad in my own home.

  But though he could ignore the sound that wasn’t there, the face looking at him was real. The face that his flashlight found, looking at him in the darkness of the hall. No ghost cries.

  Someone was with them.

  65

  Jerry’s breath solidified within him. It felt like icicles, pricking at his lungs, scorching them and piercing them and filling them with blood so that he froze and burned and drowned at once.

  The eyes that watched from the end of the hall didn’t move.

  “What is it?” whispered Ann.

  Jerry almost jumped in place, and only that strange sensation that still clenched at his lungs kept him from screaming in terror. Instead a strange choking sound issued, and the flashlight – still aimed at those staring eyes – quavered in his hand.

  Why isn’t Ann scared? She has to see it.

  Then he realized: there was no one else in the hall with them. The flashlight beam cut razor-thin shavings out of the darkness, almost useless as illumination in their near-mansion of a home. And it had illuminated nothing more than the staring eyes of a portrait, the subject of an expensive oil painting Ann had bought him for an anniversary five or six years ago.

  Jerry felt the frozen/heated/drowning sensation leave him as he exhaled, trying to do so quietly but only half-succeeding.

  “What is it?” said Ann. He shook his head, but she must have seen the flashlight beam still aimed at the portrait and intuited what had happened. She snorted under her breath, a sound that communicated perfectly her disgust at his weakness, his fear.

  The great advantage of marriage is that you have someone who understands you. The great disadvantage of marriage is that you have someone who understands you. And even on the ropes as their marriage was, Ann knew his feelings, knew his terror, and obviously despised him for it.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. But it did. Shame writhed through Jerry, and he felt like he had failed his family anew. He swallowed and pressed forward. The dark didn’t seem any lighter, but he pushed it back more easily somehow.

  They reached the other end of the hall. He didn’t know how to conduct a proficient room-to-room search – it wasn’t like he was an ex-cop or a retired SEAL. He was a surgeon. A good surgeon, even a gifted surgeon, but his recon skills were lacking. So he was glad when Ann said, “One of us should keep watch on the hall while the other looks in here.”

  Jerry nodded. Then nodded again. And again Ann understood the meaning behind the gesture: “You or me?”

  “I’ll watch the hall,” she said.

  Jerry entered the room.

  Ann was no longer right behind him, and he felt her absence starkly. He felt naked.

  The room wasn’t huge, but it was big en
ough to hide a thousand things. Easily big enough to hide Sheri… or the Killer.

  He took a breath. And started to search.

  66

  So… much… fun.

  The man watches from just far enough away that he is sure they can’t see. He has to clap his hands over his mouth to keep from laughing.

  They’re looking in all the wrong places, in all the wrong ways. Which is typical. They haven’t done anything right since this whole travesty started. He had real hopes for Drew, had real hopes that the boy would make it, but… not to be. It just wasn’t Drew’s turn to make it, that was all.

  The man watches for a bit more, then withdraws. Jerry and Ann see themselves as the heroes, perhaps. Maybe they’re still that deluded, in spite of all he’s shown them. But they’re not the heroes. The only hero in this fairy tale is him. He is the only One.

  And now he’s got a mendacious Princess waiting for his ministrations. After all: it’s his turn, and he owes her his fullest attention.

  67

  The coat rack that scared Jerry so badly before was still there. And even though he knew it was just a coat rack, it seemed to have a demonic presence to it. He thrust his hand into the coats, just to be sure no one was hiding there, and fully expected something to bite him. Like they had stepped out of the world and into some outer ring of Hell.

  And that wasn’t too far off the truth, he supposed. The Killer was almost certainly a demon, if not the Devil himself.

  He checked under and around Ann’s sewing desk, the boxes and file cabinets that cluttered the room.

  Nothing.

  There was still the closet.

  He pulled open the doors – French doors that opened with a slight squeak of hinges that sounded louder than a landmine going off. He looked at Ann automatically, as though the sound must have drawn the Killer – then realized that doing so left him totally vulnerable to attack by anyone in the closet, and whipped back around.

  He felt dizzy. He needed eyes in the back of his head.

  The closet was dark, even with the flashlight aimed at it. Full of coats and games and the clutter of life.

  So much here, thought Jerry. And I can’t remember the last time anyone used any of it. Why do we even have it? Why do we have this huge house for that matter?

  He suddenly hated the life he had led. Hated not just his mistakes, but his successes. Because his successes had made this possible.

  Could this have happened if we had lived in an apartment, two bedrooms? Cramped but happy? he wondered.

  There was nothing behind the coats and clutter, just like there was nothing behind so much of what he owned, he was realizing.

  He left the closet, and sensed movement to his left.

  The curtains.

  At first he thought automatically that they were just moving in the breeze. But how was that possible in a house that had its windows covered over in sheet metal and a bug tent?

  Jerry crept to Ann. Touched her shoulder and pointed at the curtains that flitted like restless ghosts in the corner of the room.

  She put a hand over her mouth, managing to keep her silence but obviously needing to make some show of her fear.

  Jerry pointed at himself: “I’ll check,” the gesture said. She nodded. Understanding. Marriage.

  Jerry geared up to move into the room again.

  He reached for the curtains….

  They still moved, just enough to accommodate someone breathing slowly, gently…..

  He yanked the curtains apart, ready to beat whoever was there with the flashlight, ready to beat him until he told Jerry where his daughter was.

  But it was nothing. An air conditioning vent on the floor, blowing cool air into the room, the draft moving the curtains.

  Jerry relaxed. He felt strangely like laughing and weeping at the same time. Once again it reminded him of his children’s infancy, when they would color on the walls or wreck the television or do something else that drew out his ire. And then in the next moment they smiled, or kissed him, or laughed that beautiful baby-laugh that sounded like a piece of Heaven given voice and his heart would swell with so much love it was almost too much to endure.

  One of the hardest parts of being a father, he had found, was not the highs or the lows, but the fact that they came so close together. Sometimes he felt like his heart wouldn’t be able to handle it.

  He felt like that now. Laughing at his own foolishness, crying because his baby was still gone, still held by a madman, a murderer.

  Then he realized: the curtains had been open before. They had been open in the whole house. So the Killer had been here. The question was simply when? Was it recently, or long ago? Was he playing with them again?

  Jerry heard something. He glanced at Ann and saw she heard it as well. No ghost cries, this was something real.

  There was something moving.

  Something near.

  68

  Jerry couldn’t figure out what the sound was. That scared him. But worse than that was the fact that he had no choice but to investigate. Another aspect of their new Hell: they had no personal volition. Couldn’t leave, couldn’t call out, couldn’t turn on the lights. Now they couldn’t even ignore strange noise: they had to find out what it was, because what if it was something awful happening to Sheri?

  He had never realized what a blessing it was, simply to choose whether to ignore something or not. Simply to be able to turn on a light.

  He and Ann reentered the hall, moving toward the noise. It was rhythmic, low then high then low again. It sounded like one of Jerry’s tools –

  (another blessing, the ability to just go and get a tool and trust that it would be there instead of finding a dead body hanging in its place)

  – and that thought led inexorably to thoughts of his electric sander, his circular saw. He felt himself moving faster, fear mounting as he saw an image of Sheri, her flesh being pulled in moist patches off her body by a madman holding Jerry’s own tools against her skin.

  Ann kept pace with him, her hand on his back as though to let him know she was with him.

  The sound was growing louder.

  They were getting closer to it.

  But that’s not it. It’s almost like it’s coming closer to us.

  Then Ann screamed as the sound burst into brightness, and something came into the hall.

  This time it was Jerry’s turn to be amused and a little disgusted. “It’s the vacuum cleaner,” he said.

  The Roomba floor cleaner was what was making the noise. It was an automatic vacuum, a computerized disc about four inches tall and twelve inches in diameter that scooted around the downstairs rooms every night and cleaned up without needing much in the way of human oversight. It was just doing its job. Just cleaning.

  He felt Ann bury her head in his back, felt it shaking. He moved to the Roomba and kicked it against the wall, some of his pent-up frustration and fear coming out in the form of this small violence against the appliance. The Roomba hit the wall and flipped over, a few bits of plastic exploding off it and disappearing into the darkness before it went silent.

  Ann was sobbing.

  “Just the vacuum,” he said again.

  At the same time, though, another sound could be heard. This one louder than the others, and there was no mistaking what it was. They had been walking around blindly, looking for their daughter without any clue as to how to go about doing so. Now an answer presented itself.

  Because the whimper they heard, muffled and strangled thought it was, was definitely Sheri.

  69

  The whimper came again a second later. Louder. Loud enough that Jerry could tell where it was coming from: his office. They had walked right past it earlier. Would she have been there if they had looked?

  No way to know.

  He flitted down the hall as quickly as he could, Ann behind him, hoping against hope that the Killer didn’t know they were coming. But at the same time he was aware that this was just one more choice that h
ad been made for him, one more path that he was taking whether he wanted to or not.

  Jerry flipped the flashlight to an overhead grip, holding it cop-style so he could use it as a club if need be.

  Ann was still behind him. Her hand on his back.

  They passed through the entryway, the foyer with the high ceiling that Jerry had once been so proud of. And why? He couldn’t remember. It was just one more empty trapping.