They still didn’t find much. The Killer had been thorough in removing everything that could be used as a weapon. No utensils – nothing metal that was over a few inches long – certainly no bats, no sticks. The curtains could be pulled down, but they had no rods, only a complex system of chains and reels that were sewn into the heavy fabric itself.
Sheri found a lighter in one of Drew’s pants pockets. Jerry tried not to think what his son had used it for. Then gave up the effort and found that the reality of his son’s addiction hurt a bit less than it had.
Still, the lighter wasn’t much as a weapon until he suggested adding one of Sheri’s hairsprays. She found an aerosol hairspray under her sink hidden below a box of tampons and held it like a flamethrower, one thumb on the hairspray discharge button, the other on the lighter wheel as they moved from room to room.
They had been looking for weapons before, and still were. But now that they each had something – they were also looking for more.
They were looking for the Killer. For the only way out, the way he would reveal to them.
The tension was almost unbearable, pushing down on Jerry’s head like a heavy hand. He could feel his heart thudding against his ribs as he went from place to place, and wondered if Sheri’s own heart would be able to bear up. He looked at her. She didn’t so much as glance at him. Her eyes remained locked on the flashlight beam, looking for any hint of movement.
Living room… nothing….
Media room… empty….
Jerry stepped forward, one foot half in the garage –
“Hsst!”
He froze as surely and securely as if he had been about to step on a landmine. “What?” he whispered.
Sheri was at his shoulder. “Thought I saw something.”
Jerry nodded. He swept the garage with his flashlight. And though the safe thing – the sane thing – would be to walk away from possible contact, they had to find the killer. Had to force him to get them out of here.
How you gonna do that, Jer-Jer? How you gonna force him?
Jerry clenched his jaw. He’d deal with that when they came to it.
They went into the garage. He forced himself to look at Rosa. Just in case there was some way to hide behind her.
Nothing. She was still dead, still hanging with her chin to the sky, the ladle jammed fatally down her throat. The pool of blood under her was now black and brown, a grotesque scab on what had once been the flawless floor of his garage.
The photo, the picture of the girl, was gone.
Jerry swept the flashlight away, but he knew Sheri had seen its absence and would be looking a thousand questions at him.
He looked under and around the locked cars, behind the few things large enough to hide a man.
There was no one in the garage.
On to the rest of the house.
79
Footsteps.
The man waits until he hears them die away, wondering if they will find him.
They might, he supposes. But probably not. They have no real way to get at him in here. And even if they do… he can’t be captured by them. Not completely.
He is, he supposes, magic. At least to some extent. No locked door can hold him unless he wishes it, no jail can contain him completely unless he allows such to occur.
He hears the steps recede. No door shutting – they are leaving doors open behind them as they go, and besides, they already destroyed the door to the garage.
He waits, then presses the button on the fob in his hand.
There is a click and he climbs out of the trunk of Jerry’s car. He has to stop himself from giggling.
“Hide and seek,” he whispers.
Then he glides out of the garage after the last two people, the last two pupils, the last two who have to be taught the lessons they have refused to learn.
“Ready or not, here I come,” he says, and creeps into the darkness.
80
Up the stairs.
Jerry tried not to look at his wife’s body, hanging to his right as they took the gentle curve up to the second floor. He glanced back at Sheri, though, realizing that this was the first time she was seeing this.
Sheri stopped for a second. The hand holding the hairspray went to her chest as she stared at the body.
For some reason, Jerry focused on Ann’s single missing shoe. As though the entirety of the vision was made endurable only by the fact that the hanging body had one bare foot.
He did not look at his wife’s face.
Sheri’s breath hitched. And though the love between her and Jerry was gone, still there was… something… and he took a step down to her.
She waved him away, waved him on, waved him to continue.
He did.
Drew’s room. Not too many places to hide, but some. Enough. Sheri pushed through and looked while he aimed the light, stopping every so often to point it in the hall behind him.
Sheri went into the closet and was gone from his sight for a few seconds. Jerry’s heart sped up in that instant, and he almost darted after her, but then she reappeared and shook her head.
Nothing.
81
The man waits. Listens.
His turn to hide. Theirs to seek.
So much fun.
They rummage through the boy’s room, then move out.
He moves from the jack-and-jill bathroom into the boy’s room as they go… and touches Sheri’s hair as she passes into the hall.
She shivers and turns, but he darts out of sight behind the wall of Drew’s room.
Did she see him?
Apparently not. A moment later he hears the click of them entering her room.
Too much fun too much fun too MUCH FUN!
82
By the time they got to the master bedroom, Jerry felt like he was on the verge of a heart attack. Sheri clutched her chest and bent over beside the bed. The stress was literally going to kill her.
He stepped toward her. “You okay?”
She forced herself to stand up straight. Or almost straight. She veered a bit to the side, as though gripped by a low-level scoliosis. But she waved Jerry off again. “Don’t worry about me,” she said in the same gruff voice he had heard coming from his own mouth a short time ago. No love lost from her, either, apparently.
She took a single, faltering step. Then another, with a look of determination he had rarely seen in adults, let alone teens locked in such a nightmare.
No love lost, perhaps. But admiration…?
“End of the road. What now?” she said.
“We look again.”
There was nothing else to do. They would look until they found a way out, or found the Killer, which amounted to the same thing. Jerry had briefly considered Ann’s old plan to hide themselves in the basement, but then discarded it. Their tormentor knew everything about them, and had apparently planned for just about every contingency. Jerry doubted he would be stymied by a locked basement door.
No, the only way out was through whoever was doing this.
Room by room by room, top to bottom this time.
Sheri was close on his heels for the whole search, but she started gasping by the time they reached the stairs. She didn’t look at the hanging form of her mother.
Jerry did, though. And was unsettled by the fact that she was swaying as if in a breeze. There was no air movement, though – at least none sufficient to swing a one hundred and ten pound body back and forth.
He’s been playing with her.
He swallowed away a scream, gagging it down and trying to remain silent, afraid that if he made so much as a whimper he would finally give in to the madness that had been pressing in on him, threatening to destroy his mind and leave behind nothing but a hollow shell of sense and self.
In the media room, the big-screen television was silent and dark. Television screens always seemed gray to Jerry when they were off. But in the darkness this one seemed black, like a bottomless hole to nothing, a tear in the unive
rse through which they had all fallen.
Jerry looked away, entering the room to glance around while Sheri waited near the hall to make sure no one could sneak up on them.
Sheri hissed. He turned to her. She was waving him over, facing down the hall.
“What?” he whispered, stepping toward her.
“Kitchen door just swung shut,” she whispered back.
He took another step.
Something huge swung at Jerry. He jumped back, but the thing collided with him and he felt something heavy and cool and wet. Sheri cried out and he realized it must have hit her as well; must have swung down from the balustrade above the media room.
Then he realized what it was. What had hit them, what had knocked them both back into the media room. And he screamed himself, loud and long.
83
Jerry fell back, flailing at the thing, struggling to keep from falling down, struggling to keep from grabbing onto the monstrosity for support.
It was Ted.
Their neighbor had been trussed and tied so much that he resembled a cocoon as much as a man, only this cocoon was pierced all over with the very same branches that he had consistently thrown onto their side of the wall, dozens of rough shafts of wood jammed into his body every few inches. His feet were tied so that he hung upside-down from the second-floor balustrade, swinging like a gory piñata with his head dangling a few feet above the floor of the media room.
It came to Jerry as he slowly managed to calm himself down that their persecutor was not without a sense of irony, if not a kind of twisted humor.
Then a click interrupted both his thoughts and his continuing attempts to get himself under control. He turned, but knew what he would see. It was the same click they had all heard before. The televisions.
The TV in this – and every – room had come to life. Like the tear in this reality had been illuminated, showing what lay beyond.
“What is this?” said Sheri. She pushed herself against Jerry – or better said, she pushed away from Ted, who was staring sightlessly at them from a face that itself had been perforated by no fewer than a dozen sticks, as the dead man swung back and forth, back and forth.
The screen showed a man, his face just offscreen, dressed in a TV repairman’s uniform, placing surveillance cameras through the house. They were already live as he placed them, hiding them in each room.
Jerry focused on the uniform. The repairman outfit.
“Oh, my –” he began.
“What?”
“This is how he did it. He’s the reason our cable keeps going out.”
“What do you mean?”
Jerry thought about the dozen or so times the television had switched to snow over the past few months. He pointed at the repairman uniform on the television. “We’ve let him in. Over and over.” He shivered, his eyes glued to the television. “He must have been spying on us for… who knows how long?” At the same moment he also realized that he had heard the Killer’s voice before: on the phone to the cable company.
We never called out, he realized. He rerouted our calls somehow. We’ve been living in a closed circle that he created.
The screen flickered. The scene changed to shots of mundane things a “perfect” family would do:
Goodnight kisses.
Hello hugs.
Brushing teeth.
Combing hair.
Then the TV flickered again, and now it showed the Killer in the kitchen, his back to the camera. He held something high over his head: a silver ladle.
Jerry cried out, reaching out as the Killer slammed the ladle down, knowing he couldn’t stop what had already happened but helpless to stop himself from trying.
Rosa’s feet flopped into view, twitching as blood dripped down her legs.
The scene changed again. The master bedroom. Now not merely fear but revulsion curdled Jerry’s guts.
He saw himself asleep in the bed, asleep next to Ann. Or no, not asleep: drugged. As he must have been when Rosa was killed in their home. And now the Killer dragged a screaming, shrieking mass into the room. It was Ann’s lover.
“I didn’t, I swear,” the man cried. The Killer slammed him down on the bed, right across Ann’s and Jerry’s feet. The man struggled, but couldn’t break free.
The Killer’s face was still away from the camera.
“I didn’t!” screamed the man again. “I don’t know who they are, I’ve never seen these people before!”
The Killer’s knife came out. He started carving at the man’s face, inches away from Ann’s and Jerry’s own faces. Blood dripped directly on them, and they didn’t so much as twitch.
Ann’s lover was flayed alive. Face peeled right off before he was murdered.
Ann and Jerry slept on. Slept through it, and Jerry felt like he must have been sleeping like this for most of his life, through all the secrets his family had kept. He looked at Sheri, gasping beside him, nearly choking, and felt empty inside.
There was nothing left.
The scene shifted. Now he saw what they had gone through, from the eyes of the cameras hidden in the house. The family waking, finding themselves trapped. Finding Socrates maimed and dead. Finding Ann’s lover, finding Rosa.
Drew’s death.
Ann’s death.
The Killer had clearly been watching every second of their suffering and pain. Reveling in it.
On and on went the replay of their excruciation, louder and louder and faster and faster until it all dissolved in a blur of cacophonous white noise. Jerry screamed, but couldn’t hear his own voice. He clapped his hands over his ears, but it didn’t help. He felt like he was dying, dissolving, disintegrating with the force of the static, the sound of chaos.
And then, just as it became unbearable, just as he felt like he was going to – like he must – simply fall and surrender himself to the hammer blows of the sound and light, the televisions all died.
Silence. Silence like slamming tidal waves in his skull.
Jerry turned to see if Sheri was okay.
And the Killer was standing right beside them.
84
“Secrets can kill,” said the man.
Jerry barely had time to process the words, because an instant later the man flew at them. Pure madness, pure evil. Punching, gouging, kicking, biting. He fought like it was he who was trapped, like he was the one who had to win or face a painful death at the hands of a nightmare made flesh.
Jerry stabbed out with the knife, but knew he couldn’t kill the man. They needed him to tell them the way out. Likewise, Sheri had moved away and was circling them, but she didn’t let loose with her makeshift flamethrower. He could practically hear her thoughts: Where do I hit him, where can I hurt him without hurting Dad?
Jerry bashed at the other man with the flashlight then followed the move up with a backhand slash and the Killer backpedaled into the hall. He tried to take advantage of the moment, but Sheri bounded forward and put herself between him and the Killer. She raised her jury-rigged flamethrower, obviously trying to take advantage of the space Jerry had opened up between them, but the Killer didn’t do the logical thing. He didn’t fall back and give her the room to wield her weapon. Instead he flung himself at her.
The madman hit her. A single hammer punch that landed on the top of her head. She fell.
Jerry dove over Sheri while she was still falling. He thrust the knife into the Killer’s shoulder.
The Killer roared. Threw Jerry away with strength that seemed beyond what should have come from someone his size. Jerry let go of the knife and hurtled into the wall headfirst. Sparks flew behind his eyes.
When they cleared, Sheri and the Killer were gone from the hall. Jerry heard noise in the living room and tried to stand, but his feet kept sliding out from under him.
He switched to a half-drunk crawl, and got far enough into the living room to see Sheri, her hair in the Killer’s grasp, thrown to the floor.
Strangers Page 23
