Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller

by William Michael Davidson

  Dominic, I would learn, was more than just the aloof, eccentric, hermit-like neighbor he appeared to be. He had worked as a physics instructor at USC in his earlier years and had also worked as an engineer; by the time he was forty, he had made a small fortune on various patents and inventions. He tried to explain them to me but, for the most part, he lost me after the second sentence. Never married and never having children, he spent much of his life tinkering in his garage and experimenting with his electrical gadgets. I think it is safe to say that Dominic had probably forgotten more about physics and science than I had ever learned in my entire life.

  “Now, I’d like everyone to listen,” Dominic said and turned on the small battery-powered radio he had come in with. “I’m going to turn it down to the very low AM frequencies, and all of you can listen very closely.”

  Like a magician about to perform some kind of magnificent illusion, he flexed his fingers and began to adjust the radio’s tuner. He had a natural gift for showmanship; I caught myself leaning forward, rapt, waiting for something to happen. Finally, I could hear a little something, but it sounded just like electrical interference, the kind of static and glitching you might hear on your radio if someone was running a hairdryer in a nearby bathroom.

  We all waited for something more to happen—perhaps some kind of sound to emerge—but that was all there was. He had turned to a station with no broadcast signal, and all we could hear was the intermittent static, but I could tell, by the proud expression on Dominic’s jolly face, that this was exactly what he wanted us to here. I didn’t get it.

  “Dominic,” I said, seeing how everyone else in the room was just as confused as I was, “all I hear is interference.”

  “Exactly!” he said.

  I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Great, I thought. I have a killer in the garage and I just brought a nutcase into my living room.

  “But it’s not just static,” he said proudly. “You’re listening to the lightning. The lightning in the clouds. It’s right here. Right in these speakers.”

  This, of course, was met with even more silence.

  Dominic went on. “What I’ve done here is tune to a low station on the AM band,” he said. “AM radio makes an excellent lightning detector. The static crashes you’re hearing right now are actually the lightning in real-time, because the radio waves and the lightning are both traveling at the speed of light. The lightning creates radio waves, and that’s what you’re hearing.”

  “I know all about that,” Jesse said. “We had storm interference on the television and radio all the time in Louisiana, but what does it matter? How does that help us?”

  “Well, I doubt you ever heard storm interference quite like this,” Dominic said. “Have you listened closely, all of you? Have you listened really closely to the static that you hear?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “You’re not listening close enough,” Dominic said and turned the volume up. The blipping and blitzing static interference grew louder and filled my living room. “Now listen for a pattern in it. Can you hear it? It’s not just the random interference you would expect in a storm. There’s a definite, intentional pattern to it, but you have to listen closely. Try to focus in and hear it.”

  I remembered an optical illusion painting I’d seen several years ago back at the Seattle Center. When I looked at the painting and let my eyes lose their focus, a three dimensional image popped out of it, but I had to wait for a while and be patient before I could really make out that image. That was kind of what this felt like; only, instead of waiting for my eyes to adjust, I was waiting for my ears to somehow acclimate to what I was supposed to hear.

  All of us sat quietly in my living room for many long minutes, trying to discern whatever it was we were supposed to hear in the static. Darrel, who must have just woken up, walked into the room. He didn’t look surprised or confused to see all of us sitting in the room, quietly listening to the virtual nothingness on our neighbor’s radio. I was pretty convinced at that point that Darrel had mentally checked out completely. With his hands buried deep in his pockets, he leaned against the wall and looked off into nowhere. Frozen between grief and anger, Darrel was pretty much a walking zombie.

  I kept listening to the static, and while I couldn’t make out something concrete, there was a pattern to it. There was some definite rhythm and orchestration to it, and it was, so far as I could tell, not the interference that randomly occurring lightning would generate.

  “I think I hear it,” I was the first to say. Maybe it was because I’m a writer and I painstakingly work with words every single day. “It almost sounds like language or something. Like it’s some kind of communication.”

  “I hear it too,” Marsha said. “It almost sounds like Morse Code.”

  My wife also thought she could hear something, but Jesse and Samantha said it just sounded like a bunch of static to them. Owen was too concerned about finding out where his girlfriend was to offer his opinion, and Darrel, of course, wasn’t much aware of anything going on around him. I thought it was amusing that my wife and Marsha could both discern the language in the static; they were both talkers, natural communicators, and I wondered if that had something to do with it.

  “Oh yes, just like Morse Code,” Dominic said. “It sounds an awful lot like that. I think it may be possible, perhaps likely, that the storm is trying to communicate.”

  “You’re telling me this storm is trying to talk to us?” Jesse asked.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s quite possible. It sounds like some form of communication, and this clearly isn’t a natural storm. I take it that none of your cell phones work, am I right?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Well, they should work just fine. Cell phones use microwave frequencies, and a storm—even a big storm like this—shouldn’t take out every cell phone beneath it. This storm isn’t playing by the rules of science as we know it and I think, when you spend a little time listening to it, you can hear some kind of communication.”

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said. “I think if you listen to any kind of static long enough, you can probably hear whatever you want in it. Kind of like when you’re a kid and you look at the clouds and see animals and things in them. If you look at something long enough and want to see something long enough, you’ll see it. Know what I mean?”

  “How is this going to help us?” Samantha asked, clearly frustrated. “How do we get off this island? I want off now. How is static going to help us get off this island?”

  “Well, let him finish explaining,” Marsha said. “He can’t magically take us away now, can he?”

  “I’m just tired and sick of being stuck here, and I was hoping to hear something more than just static, alright?” Samantha complained, folded her arms in front of her, and looked away bitterly. I thought it was interesting that my son, despite his preoccupation with his girlfriend, was more selfless than this grown woman during a time of disaster.

  “Oh yes, the woman brings up a very good point, which is the second thing I’d like to share with you,” Dominic said. He set the radio at his feet, rubbed his hands together, and took a rather long, dramatic breath. “The communication—whatever it is—stops occasionally. It completely ceases, and it seems that it does so according to some kind of pattern. I believe that, during these times, the electrical activity stops.”

  I think it took everyone a moment to translate what he was saying, or at least, to contemplate the significance of it; even if the static on the radio stopped occasionally, why would it matter? Who cared? It seemed like a completely irrelevant detail in regards to our situation.

  Dominic reached into the pocket of his pants, pulled out another Twinkie, and began to unwrap it. Other than the static-like language emanating from the radio’s speakers and the sound of Dominic unwrapping his Twinkie, we were left in silence.

  “What do you mean the electrical activity stops? What does that mean?” I asked.


  “Let me explain it this way,” Dominic said. “The evening of July fifth, a little more than twenty-four hours after the storm hit our island with a vengeance, the electrical activity briefly ceased. It went down at precisely three minutes after eight o’clock at night for thirty minutes. I was monitoring on my radio at the time, and the electrical activity stopped. No static. No communication. Just emptiness. I monitored it visually, as well. When I verified what I heard by looking outside, I noticed that there was no cloud-to-cloud lightning or cloud-to-ground lightning then. The clouds were dark and swollen, but there wasn’t a single flicker of activity in them.”

  What he said was interesting, and I knew he was going somewhere with it, so I listened attentively.

  “But a funny thing happened,” he said. “While I was monitoring the following night, July sixth, the same thing happened. At exactly three minutes after eight o’clock, the communication on my radio stopped. Dead silence. Only that night, the electrical activity ceased for exactly twenty-five minutes, five minutes less than the previous night. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Strange,” Jesse said, “but what does it mean?”

  “Oh yes, I suppose I can only speculate at this point,” Dominic said. He took another bite of his Twinkie and leaned back in his chair in reflective thought. As the relatively eccentric science type, he might have looked somewhat dignified leaning back in my leather chair with a pipe or a cigar in his hand; holding that Twinkie, he looked a bit silly. “Last night, the cloud ‘shut down’ for exactly twenty minutes. Every night it’s shutting down and losing five minutes. It is hard to imagine that to be coincidence, don’t you think? And something else happened too. The clouds, after that, seemed much lower than before. Much, much lower.”

  Jesse and I looked at each other. We had been outside and had seen the low-hanging clouds. They had been lower than before; there was no questioning that.

  “But what does this mean?” my wife asked. “Does it mean we can get off the island? Does it mean we can finally leave?”

  Even Owen, who was standing next to Darrel and leaning against the wall, seemed to take genuine interest. Dominic was building to some important point.

  “I think it means this,” Dominic said. “I think the storm is in some kind of pattern. I don’t know exactly. During those intervals, when my radio went dead and when I looked up at the clouds, I think it was possible to get through. I think someone could cross over the water then without the lightning taking them out. In theory, I think those are the times that the storm is recharging. It’s gathering energy, whatever it’s doing. And interestingly enough, the storm intensifies just before each of these breaks. Haven’t you noticed? Each night the storm is getting worse. And each night, following the worst of it, there are these small, narrowing gaps of inactivity.”

  “So we could have gotten out?” Samantha asked, her voice full of defeat. I thought she might completely break down into tears right there. “You’re telling us that we could have gotten out and we missed it? We missed it?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I think we could have gotten out during those windows of time, but I’m not certain. It’s all a hypothesis, really. It can’t be proven until someone actually attempts it, right? But I think the same thing is going to happen tonight, and that’s what I’d like to verify. Tonight, at exactly three after eight, I think there’s a good chance the same thing will happen again. Only this time, I’d be willing to bet that it’ll shut down for exactly fifteen minutes, five minutes less than last night. And I’d be willing to bet that, just like before, the storm will rage just before the pause.”

  “So you’re saying we can get out tonight?” Jesse asked.

  “Or tomorrow night,” Dominic said. “If the pattern continues, it’ll be too narrow after tomorrow night. I don’t think anybody would be able to get out in so short a time period after that. Even tomorrow night, at ten minutes, would be pushing it. And remember, it’s all just a theory at this point. It would take someone to actually test it to see if it’s valid, and I think tonight will prove whether it’s just a freak coincidence or whether there is really a pattern to the storm.”

  “But what is it?” Owen asked. I was surprised to hear him speak up amongst the adults in the room, but he was as attentive as ever. “What is this storm?”

  “Oh yes, that’s a question I can’t answer,” Dominic said, shrugging. He finished his Twinkie, crinkled up the wrapper, and shoved it into his pocket. “There are many possibilities, but I guess, if I had to make a definitive answer, I would say it is somehow alive. It’s not just a storm. It’s alive, and I think, like lots of organisms, it’s trying to destroy us. Those clouds are getting lower and lower. I say we have a couple more days, perhaps, before it completely wipes us out. I do remember in college once reading about a strange historical incident. The Carrington Event?”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “It was the largest solar flare in recorded history. 1859. Made the sky glow, but geomagnetic disturbances brought down telegraph systems across the globe and some of those same telegraph machines sparked and went up in flames. Caused terrible fires. If we make it through all this, you should look it up some time. There was one small town that was hit particularly hard—somewhere in Virginia—and the people became paranoid. I think it was called Rockville, but I could be wrong. Strange geomagnetic phenomena happened and prevented people from leaving. A terrible storm entrapped them, much like what has happened to us. And the residents turned on each other. I think nearly ten people were killed. But they had issues before all that, at least, according to some articles.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  “Trust issues,” Dominic said, grinning. “That was two years before the civil war, you know. The country was divided and dealing with all kinds of issues. Lincoln would, of course, become president in 1860. It was a time of tension, change, and division. And even more, a time of fear.”

  I waited. What was he getting at?

  “What I’m saying is this,” he said. “There are people out there—conspiracy theorists, I suppose—who think the Carrington Event wasn’t just a freak solar flare. There’s been other events, too. Lots if you study them. But some think that it was a monster, for lack of a better word. A monster that we’ve fed and that we’ve nurtured. Hatred. Bigotry. Division. Those are the things it feeds on.”

  I considered this. Suddenly, I felt like we were talking science fiction.

  “The timing couldn’t be better,” Dominic said. “Have you watched CNN? Have you watched Fox News? Makes you feel like the world’s coming unglued, doesn’t it? Maybe it found a hole here—in our little community—to try again. To gather strength. To make its entrance into the world.”

  “What happened to the people in that town? What did they do?”

  “That’s the thing,” Dominic said. “They were in a remote area, and they had little help. As they ran out of food and supplies, they turned more and more on each other. They became paranoid and hoarded food and supplies, until one guy, I think his name was John, was credited for being the leader to help them survive. He’s the guy who talked sense into the town, got them working together again, and brought justice. It’s what he said that was so interesting and what caused all of the stories.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, when asked what they did to survive the storm, he answered simply: We starved it.”

  “We starved it,” I said, trying to make sense of it.

  These words brought contemplative silence, and I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Dominic. I didn’t know if the storm was “alive” in the way that he meant or if it was some freakish entity sent from another world, but I was more than convinced that it was trying to destroy us. It began with all of the things that had gone mysteriously missing; I thought of Jenna’s wedding ring, Bessie, and my wife’s lingerie. I remembered the solemn faces on the Naples residents before Drake unleashed his fury and before the crazy lightning struck.

>   Yes, it was clear to me that the storm was trying to destroy us; but it had been trying to destroy us even before the lightning took out the bridges and before the dark, swirling storm clouds settled solely above Naples. Maybe it was alive and had some kind of intelligence, because it was clearly trying to turn us against each other even before it trapped us there. I hadn’t yet talked to Marsha, Samantha, or any of the others about the things that had gone missing from their homes, but I knew the storm had been at work before Drake went on his killing spree. I was totally convinced by Dominic’s observation: the storm was trying to destroy us, through whatever means available, and this might be our only ticket off the island.

  “I was kind of hoping you would be able to help,” Dominic said, directing his comment toward me. “I heard you’re a writer, right? What would you do? Aren’t you guys good at coming up with creative solutions like this? What would you do if you were writing a story and your characters were in this situation?”

  “What would I do? What would I write?” I asked and contemplated it. A little neighborhood community trapped on an island in a storm that sizzled anybody who tried to get on or get off it? A mass murderer tied up in my garage? A widower who had turned into a zombie since his wife was slaughtered right in front of his eyes? A high-maintenance flirt and a menopausal woman constantly nagging each other in the midst of all of it? “I think only a complete idiot would attempt to write something like this.”

  “Really?” Dominic said. “Why?”

  “Because it’s an antagonist that you can’t beat,” I said. “You can’t fight a storm. You can’t win against a storm. You have to just sit and wait it out. It wouldn’t make much of a story, and it wouldn’t give a protagonist a fighting chance. So I think we have no choice. We have to see if you’re right. Maybe we can get out of here.”