by Ray Garton
Someone said, "Get a room, for cryin' out loud," and Hal lifted his head to see that everyone was leaving the theater. The closing credits were running on the big screen. He sat up, then so did Jacquie.
They cleared their throats as they brushed at their clothes.
Jacquie stood, but Hal tugged on her hand until she sat down beside him again. "What's wrong?"
"I can't stand up yet."
"Why can't you—oh. Okay." She smiled. "We can wait."
So they waited. The theater emptied, leaving Hal and Jacquie the only two remaining patrons. Pretty soon, someone would come in and tell them they couldn't stay for the next showing unless they paid for it again—
"Okay," Hal said. "I'm fine now."
It was pouring outside, and they ran together to the car. Bolts of lightning lit up the clouds and part of the night and were followed by thunder that rumbled across the sky. Once on the road, windshield wipers sweeping frantically back and forth over the glass, Hal said, "Well, what did you think of the movie?"
They laughed together. "Look, Hal, I want you promise me something."
"Anything."
"Promise me that no matter how long we're married, we'll always continue to go on dates. Like tonight. A real date, where you ask me, and I check my schedule and say yes, and you take me someplace nice and treat me the way you treated me tonight, like...like I'm a beautiful woman. Promise me we'll always do that."
"No problem at all. Once every month. No matter how long we're married. No matter how many kids we have. One night every month, you and I go on a date."
Smiling, Jacquie leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
Jacquie laughed. "We're gonna get married!"
"How about that?"
Hal left the freeway and went around a few surface corners.
"Look," he said. "All the lights in the neighborhood are out."
"Oh, no."
"Looks like we don't have any power, either," Hal said as he drove up his driveway, which was slanted at a steep angle. He brought the Taurus to a stop and killed the engine, but he left the lights on.
"Oh, no," Jacquie said.
"What's wrong?"
"Something you don't know about me—I'm terrified of thunderstorms, and of the dark."
"Really? Well, tonight should scare the hell out of you, then!"
They both laughed, but Jacquie glanced away uncomfortably and her tone became somber.
"I'm serious. I can't sleep in the dark. You'll have to get used to that about me—haven't you ever noticed that I have to have some kind of light on when I sleep? Because if I wake up in total darkness, I'll start screaming."
"Wow, screaming? Really?"
"Yes. It might not sound like much to you, but it's really—"
"No, don't say that. I think it's a terrible thing. I take it very seriously."
"You do?"
"Of course I do. Don't worry, I have lots of kerosene lanterns and plenty of kerosene, and I've got some big Coleman lanterns, too, so we won't be in the dark. And I'm not going to let anything happen to you."
They just sat there for a moment and looked at each other, looked deep into each other's eyes, the way only new lovers can. Finally, their gaze was broken, and Hal said, "You want me to run inside and get you an umbrella?"
"No, don't be silly. I don't mind getting a little wet."
"You hear that? It's pouring out there."
"I don't mind. Really."
They hurried from the Taurus to the porch, where Hal quickly unlocked the front door and they rushed inside, both of them with hair soaked flat to their heads, clothes sagging from being so wet. But they laughed as he closed the door, and they sort of collided, and their arms went around each other as they pressed their mouths together.
There were still a few glowing embers in the fireplace, and Hal pulled away and said, "Let me get a fire going in here to warm the place up."
Ten minutes later, a fire crackled in the fireplace and Hal got some kerosene lanterns and lit them up, lit a few candles. Jacquie had stripped down to nothing and put on one of Hal's sweatshirts, which was quite baggy and large even on Hal, so it was even more so on Jacquie. She looked incredible in it—just a plain old grey sweatshirt that swallowed her up and fell just below her crotch, fully revealing her long, shapely legs. He went to her and bent down to cup a hand to the side of her knee, then rose slowly as he slid the hand up her silky leg, getting a chill from its perfect smoothness, its unbelievable power to speed up his heart rate, to engorge his penis with blood.
Jacquie undressed him and kissed him all over as they moved through the dark and headed slowly for Hal's bedroom. His suit ended up scattered all over the living room, and they ended their short journey by falling onto his bed, naked, hands moving all over, feeling each other, gently squeezing, pinching, stroking, lips closing on flesh, teeth nipping at it.
When he entered her, she cried out. It was a pleasant, happy sound, the kind of sound one might make when surprised by an unexpected gift, or an unpredicted kiss.
Then Hal made his pleasant sound. They kissed, and as they kissed, they cooed like panting, sweating doves.
5.
Something ripped Hal from his sleep.
He awoke sitting up in bed, listening. All he could hear was the rain still pouring outside.
Jacquie was not in bed with him.
Disturbed by the sudden movement, Grey, who was curled up beside Hal, lifted his head and looked around. He got up on his feet and stretched, then hopped off the side of the bed and wandered out of the room.
One of the kerosene lanterns burned on Hal's dresser, giving the dark room a soft glow and deep shadows. He'd left it burning for Jacquie. Somehow, he'd never noticed before that she always left some light on—in the bathroom, in the hall—when they slept. Now that he thought about it, he knew it was true.
Rain poured outside, and now a wind blew the rain against the glass of the windows in the bedroom. Lightning flickered and lit up the windows intermittently. Thunder growled across the sky.
The covers on Jacquie's side of the bed had been thrown back. He looked through the darkness and across the room at the bathroom doorway—the door was open and the bathroom was empty.
"Jacquie?" he said, his voice hoarse with sleepiness.
No response.
Something had woke him—a sound, something sudden and loud. It was still ringing in his ears, although he still couldn't identify what it had been.
Maybe it had been a nightmare.
A scream in a nightmare? he thought.
Hal scrubbed a hand down his face and threw back his covers, turned and let his legs fall over the side of the bed. When he clicked on the bedside lamp, nothing happened—the power was still out. He took the flashlight from his nightstand and stood. He slipped his feet into his slippers and took his black-and-grey terrycloth robe from a chair by the bed and put it on.
In the bedroom doorway, he shone the light up and down the hall, but saw no sign of Jacquie.
"Jacquie?" he said again, a little louder.
He shuffled down the hall, his slippers whispering against the carpet, and passed through the living room. He swept the light back and forth as he went, looking for some sign of Jacquie. Surely she wouldn't have gotten up in the middle of the night and gone home, would she? In this downpour?
Light came from the dining room, and that made him feel better. He rounded the corner into the dining room and found a Coleman lantern lit on the table.
"Jacquie?" he said as he turned left and went into the kitchen.
What he saw made him cry out in horror and pain.
At first, he thought maybe she'd spilled something on the floor, then slipped in it and fallen down. But she did not move.
The light from the Coleman lantern on the dining room table cast deep shadows through the kitchen. Hal raised his flashlight and sent the beam moving over the kitchen floor.
The blood was deep-red against the robin's-egg-blue tiles.
The uncurtained window over the sink flickered with lightning and Hal felt the thunder in the floor under his feet when it roared.
Jacquie lay on her right side, one arm stretched out before her. She was naked and sickly pale. Blood had puddled beneath the lower part of her right leg. Hal turned the light on it and saw a hideous gash in her calf—a large section of flesh was missing, revealing only raw, bloody tissue in a half-moon gash that appeared to be the result of a large bite. Her throat had been ripped open and blood had cascaded down her chest and stomach and pooled beneath her upper body on the floor beneath her. Her mouth was open, as were her eyes.
"Jac...quie?" he said again, this time in a hoarse whisper.
He went to her and hunkered down at her side, careful not to step in the blood, but he could not look at her for long. He clenched his eyes shut and let his head fall forward. His hands trembled and his legs felt weak as he stood again.
Suddenly, he could no longer feel the floor beneath his feet. He felt as if his head were turning inside-out, as if his brain were screaming. But it was Hal himself who screamed. The sound seemed to come to him from a great distance at first, then rapidly grew closer and louder until his own screaming voice was deafening. He swallowed the sound and it ended raggedly as he put both hands over his face. His entire body shivered with sudden cold in spite of his heavy robe, a chill that radiated from deep inside his bones out to his flesh.
The police, he thought, I have to call the police.
He looked at the phone across the room and decided to use the phone in the living room so he wouldn't risk messing up what was, he reminded himself, a crime scene. He turned to leave the kitchen when he heard a sound.
It was a creaking sound, as if the creaky part of the floor were being stepped on—except it wasn't a creaky floor in this case, because Hal knew all the creaks in his floor, and this simply wasn't one of them. It was some other wood creaking—once, then again, then a third time. Then—
Something clumped in the living room.
Ice water coursed through Hal's veins. His heartbeat was thunder in his ears. His fingertips tingled and his scrotum shrank.
The killer's still in the house, he thought. It was a loud thought—his voice shouted out the words in his mind. Hal heard them, as if he had spoken them out loud, but he had not so much as parted his lips. His teeth clenched so hard that his jaws ached.
Another sound—a shapeless, characterless sound, unidentifiable, but unmistakable. Someone was moving around in the darkened house.
Hal chewed hard on his lower lip. He tried to slow down his breathing, tried to get hold of himself.
In the drawer of his nightstand, he kept a loaded .38 revolver. He closed and opened his hands at his sides as he thought about it, lying there waiting to be used—at the other end of the house.
A cry from Grey cut through the night, then the cat hissed viciously and repeatedly. He let out a yelp, and Hal heard him run down the hall.
He heard what sounded like a low, throaty chuckle.
More strange creaking.
Hal listened closely. He listened hard, actually straining his ears, reaching out with his hearing, waiting with dread for that next sound, focusing on that entirely. He was so intensely focused on that, that when he finally heard it—something in the front bathroom shattered—his whole body jerked.
The windows throbbed with silent lightning, and thunder shook Hal's bones.
If he wanted to get to his bedroom, Hal would have to move now, and fast, while the killer was in the front bathroom, preoccupied with something in there. He would have to run—no, jog, try to be as quiet as possible—he would have to jog down the hall to his bedroom and go for that gun. If he waited, the killer would leave the bathroom and maybe go down the hall ahead of Hal, ending Hal's chances of getting to the revolver.
So that was what he did.
He turned the flashlight off and jogged through the dark.
He went out of the kitchen and dining room, and through the living room—past the front bathroom—and he nearly tripped over his own feet when he saw it, when it hit him. It closed like a giant, fetid mouth over his face, over his head—it filled his field of vision, as if his eyes had zoomed in on it like a pair of expensive binoculars.
He clicked on the flashlight and lifted the beam, just to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
He did not understand it yet, had no grasp of what it meant once he'd fully realized what he was seeing. But the realization poured over him like a bucket of ice-cold water that sent gooseflesh down his back.
The cross on the living room wall was empty.
The wooden, bloody, fanged figure of Christ was gone.
Something released a pinched, ragged growl in the front bathroom.
Don't think about it, just go! Hal thought.
He abandoned the idea of jogging, and broke into a run.
6.
Hal dove through the open bedroom door, then dove again for the bed and landed on it face-down. He flailed across the bedspread, slammed open the drawer of his nightstand, and grabbed the gun.
Gun in hand, he rolled over and sat up with the gun aimed directly at the open door, and quickly got off the bed and to his feet.
His chest rose and fell as he panted. He felt his heartbeat all over his body. As he listened for more sounds, he became unpleasantly aware of his tongue—it felt bloated and oversized in his mouth, a fat impediment.
He listened, but heard nothing. Only the rain outside, only the thunder. Every now and then, the windows lit up with the silver flash of lightning—it flickered around the edges of shades, curtains, and blinds. There were long vertical eggshell-colored blinds over the big window that looked out on the back yard.
Nothing inside the house made a sound.
Seconds passed, then minutes. How many? Hal was in a heart-pounding daze. The black rectangular face of the digital clock on his nightstand stared at him blindly, offering nothing. But he felt time pass.
And nothing happened. He heard nothing.
You've got to call the police, he told himself.
Are you sure you saw what you thought you saw?
He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking, trying to be sure. Finally, he decided to go back to the living room. Just to make sure. But he didn't move, he just sat there on the edge of the bed.
It was dark. He had the flashlight, but that bright beam could have a distorting effect on things, couldn't it? Was it possible that he'd only thought he'd seen an empty cross?
What was he talking about here, after all—a wooden Jesus stepping down from its cross and wandering around?
Someone in the bedroom giggled.
Hal was alone in the bedroom, so he came the conclusion that it was he who had giggled.
He did it again. The more he thought about it, the funnier it was. His giggle turned into an outright laugh. And the laughing continued until it was like a pair of hands closing on his throat. He laughed until his stomach muscles hurt. He bent over and slapped his thigh once. The very idea—a fanged, wooden Jesus a little under two feet tall—coming down from its cross—how could he not laugh at that? It was hilarious. Even more hilarious is how firmly he believed that was what he'd seen—an empty cross. He had to be mistaken, had to be. A trick of the darkness, the shadows, the flashlight beam.
Finally, he regained control of himself and managed to stop laughing, but he had to go to the bathroom very badly, so he left the bedroom and went into the hallway bathroom, led by the flashlight beam, and emptied his bladder into the toilet, then flushed.
He looked at his reflection in the big mirror over the sink, saw how distorted it looked in the glow of the flashlight. Depending on where he held the light, he could make himself look older, angry—hell, he could make himself look as scary as a serial killer.
Jacquie is lying dead in the kitch
en.
The thought made him flinch, like a slap to the face. He went on down the hall to the living room. He raised the flashlight beam and shone it near the cross rather than on it.
His mouth fell open.
The cross was, indeed, empty.
"Hal..." a voice whispered somewhere in the dark. "Harold Lawrence Dillon!" It was a low, guttural whisper, with a bit of a throaty gurgle in it.
Hal found that he could not move. He felt frozen in place, like an ice carving.
Lightning made the living room glow for a heartbeat and a half. Thunder crashed.
"Hal...Harold...Harold Lawrence Dillon!"
The bottom seemed to fall out of Hal's stomach.
It knows my name, he thought.
"I know your sins, Hal," the whispering voice said.
It was coming from his right, from behind the recliner.
Hal turned slowly toward the chair, lifting the gun a little from his side. With the other hand, he shone the flashlight down on the floor in front of the recliner, then to the side a little.
There was a rush of movement suddenly and a frantic creaking as something shot through the flashlight beam, but Hal got only a glimpse of it, and then—
—burning, piercing pain exploded in his bare right calf and tore up his leg.
He staggered to his left and swung the light down to the floor beside him.
It was gone.
He tried to put weight on his right leg and went down to the floor, fast and heavy, with a pained grunt through clenched teeth. He lay there a moment, trying to catch his breath. The wound in his right calf throbbed mercilessly. He felt the warm trickle of blood dribble down into the heel of his slipper. He wondered how bad it was. What had the damned thing done to him, anyway?
Still lying on the floor, he rolled onto his back. He held perfectly still and listened, tried to hear above the sound of his heartbeat in his ears.
