Blackout

by Tim Curran

  Ray had gone about five steps from the porch when he stopped.

  He cocked his head as if he were listening. Something out there had him either puzzled…or scared. I pushed in closer to the window so I could see what he was seeing and maybe to call him back. He stood there shining his little penlight around. Against the enclosing blackness, the beam was white as sugar, very bright. It cut through the darkness like a laser. It almost looked like he had a white sword in his hand. I noticed something then I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was the angle of the light or the reflection or refraction…but the darkness was not just the absence of illumination, it was something more. I could see it moving around Ray like a mist of coal dust. I saw it thicken and expand until he became a filmy shape.

  And then I saw something move out there, something huge.

  Ray made a sort of choking sound and maybe I did, too. Before I could so much as call to him to get back inside, that weird blue orb appeared, hovering about ten feet or so above him. It looked like a radiant platter, perfectly circular, a phosphorescent eye of blue-green-white light that was so intense I had to look away.

  But Ray didn’t look away.

  He stood there, frozen, staring up at it as if he were hypnotized. Maybe he was. That monstrous glowing eye had him and he wasn’t getting away. He didn’t even make an attempt to. The eye, or whatever it might have been, was set in the face of some massive black amorphous shape that moved ever closer to him. Then it took him. It happened very quickly. I saw a multitude of black whipping tendrils like the tentacles of a squid seem to explode out of the darkness. They were made of that same glossy black material as the cables. There were literally dozens of them in motion, undulating and coiling and reaching out with amazing speed. No squid or octopus in existence had that many arms. They took hold of Ray easily, winding him up, seeming to cocoon him.

  He screamed.

  We all heard him scream.

  Iris fell back from her walker and I caught her. I heard her voice saying, “Dear God, dear God, dear God,” again and again. By then, Bonnie and Billy were there, seeing what we were seeing and struck speechless by it.

  “Get her out of here,” I told Bonnie and she stumbled away, supporting Iris, taking her through the living room and into the kitchen. She did this blindly, without question.

  Ray was a dead man and I knew it, but my mind kept racing in those few precious seconds after the tendrils grabbed him. It was looking for a plan of action, trying to come up with something, but there was nothing. There wasn’t a damn thing I or anyone else could have done. Billy and I stood there helplessly, both trembling, both breathing hard, both filled with a combination of terror, revulsion, and wonder.

  We both saw what happened next.

  Mere seconds after the thing seized Ray, he let out one last scream and the thing crushed him. There was a sound like a dog crunching through bone and Ray jerked and some fleshy white mass was forced from his mouth. I think it was his stomach. The creature moved off into the darkness and its orb blinked out and there was only that same impenetrable blackness out there pushing up against the window.

  I just stood there shaking from head to toe.

  Billy kept making a swallowing sound like he couldn’t get any good spit down his throat. “What the fuck?” he finally said and there was a sobbing quality to his voice. “What the fuck just happened?”

  But I didn’t know and had I known, I doubted whether I could have unlocked my jaw long enough to tell him. I felt like I was carved from wood. My body was completely inflexible. The tone of Billy’s voice was confused and desperate and god-awful scared. It was the voice of a little boy who’d just seen his puppy get run down in the road. He was looking to me to tell him how such a thing could be, how it could have happened in a sane and ordered universe. He wanted me to make sense of it, to put it into some kind of logical perspective, but I couldn’t and my inability almost hurt me.

  I got myself moving and I took Billy by the arm. “We better get the hell away from this window. It knows where we are and I don’t think it’s just going to go away.”

  He looked at me. His eyes were wide, his mouth pulled into a crooked line, and his face was beaded with sweat. In the pale lantern light, he looked like one of those characters Johnny Craig used to draw for Vault of Horror: sweaty, staring, broken by fear, on the verge of some shocking truth or dark revelation that would twist his mind completely out of shape. He reached out a hand and touched me as if he was trying to confirm my reality.

  “C’mon,” I said.

  We had reached the couch when that luminous orb clicked back on just outside the living room window as if someone had flicked on a spotlight. It leered in at us like the eye of a cyclops, filling the room with cool blue light. Billy and I just stopped where we were like frogs captured in a strong flashlight beam. I think it was instinctive. If you freeze up, what’s after you won’t be able to find you. But in that situation, it wasn’t applicable. That thing out there knew where we were and I had a pretty good idea that we could have hid in a closet and it still would have seen us.

  Bonnie said something from the kitchen, but I never heard what it was because the picture window blew in. Dozens of tentacles—I’ll call them that—exploded into the room in a shower of glass, looping and twisting and thrashing like downed high-tension lines jumping with deadly electricity. It happened quickly, with lethal speed. If anything, it was like watching a time-lapse of a tree growing roots at hyperspeed—the tentacles seemed to grow into the room until it was filled with them. They were bigger around than my thigh where they fed out of the darkness, tapering to needle-thin points. They were wild and destructive, upending the sofa and tossing the rocking chair through the air. Two of them smashed the coffee table with their weight and others shattered the wide-screen TV and tore ceiling tiles free. The wiry tips of them were like razors. They slit open the sofa and cut deep grooves in the walls.

  Billy and I scrambled away and one of them, as if hearing us, came after us like a gigantic python. Its tip slashed at me, missed, and sliced a lampshade cleanly in two. We made it into the kitchen and I kicked the door shut just as the tentacles hit the other side like rustling, writhing vines in a windstorm. They beat against it and I could hear their sharp tips gouging into the wood. Whap! Whap! Whap! Without even having to ask, Billy grabbed one end of the kitchen table and I grabbed the other, wedging it up against the door.

  “What’s going on?” Bonnie demanded. “What in the hell is going on?”

  “Shut up!” Billy snapped at her, pulling the flashlight from her hand with such force I thought he had yanked her arm out of its socket.

  The tentacles were still beating against the door, sliding against it with a smooth slithering sort of sound. I could see the blinding blue light coming under it and seeping around the edges. The doorknob jiggled again and again. Whether that was from the tentacles brushing against it or one of them investigating it, I didn’t know, but I had this crazy image in my head of the creature attempting to turn the knob and let itself in. The jiggling was rather gentle, insistent but gentle…then there was a loud cracking and the knob and its housing was ripped free from the other side.

  Bonnie, who was crouched there on the floor by the stove holding Iris, who looked stricken mad, said, “Billy…do something! For godsake, do something!”

  Billy looked from his wife to me with utter helplessness. His mouth kept opening and closing like he wanted to say something but nothing came out. He looked like a salmon gasping for air.

  Iris crouched there with Bonnie, her eyes bulging from her wrinkled, sallow face like Ping-Pong balls. There was a visible tremor beneath her skin and she kept smacking her lips like she was trying to moisten them. The loose jowls beneath her chin seemed to vibrate. “All of us, one by one, are going to get taken away,” she said. “That’s the way it is and that’s the way they planned it. We can’t hide. They’ll find us. They’ll find us all.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Billy sa
id.

  He grabbed the only weapon he saw: a broom. He picked it up and held it before him like a lance. The gaping hole in the door where the knob had been suddenly filled with worming motion as one of the tentacles slipped through. About three feet of it entered the room, the tip of it swaying from side to side as if it couldn’t make up its mind what to do. But if it couldn’t, Billy had no such constraints. Before I could stop him, he jumped forward and cracked the tentacle with the broom handle with a solid dull thump. He hit it again and again and it had the same effect as beating a rubber hose with a baseball bat. He knocked it around but it did not retreat.

  It just waited there.

  We waited with it.

  After about five seconds of that and five seconds of Billy smacking it around, I said, “Stop it, Billy. Just leave it alone.”

  He hesitated for a second and the tentacle—slick and black and oily—began to pulsate. The tapering sharp tip of it expanded, swelling like a snake that had just swallowed a mouse, becoming bulbous and blunt. Then it opened like a spout and squirted a string of goo at the broom handle. A copious amount of it enveloped the end. Billy still held on to it. The tentacle just waited there, the sticky rope of goo connecting it to the broom end. Then the goo moved. With a slimy, gushing sort of sound it slid down the broom handle towards Billy’s hands. It acted like it was alive and I was reminded of that scene in The Blob where the old man pokes the meteorite with a stick and it cracks open, the alien jelly sliding up the stick and engulfing his hand.

  Billy let go of it before something like that happened and the tentacle sucked in the string of goo like a kid with a ribbon of snot, taking the broom with it. Both disappeared out through the hole in the door. For another minute or so we could hear the other tentacles rooting about in the living room and then silence. The blue glow winked out. By that time, Billy and I were huddled with Bonnie and Iris by the stove.

  Ten minutes later, the thing was still gone.

  “Must have needed a broom real bad,” Iris said and Bonnie broke into hysterical giggling that was about as close to the sound of full mental collapse as anything I’d ever heard.

  And the night was still young.

  13

  About an hour later we heard the horn. It sounded in the night, shrill and insistent. One long beep, followed by two shorter ones. At first, I thought it was the things out there making some kind of weird noise, but it was just a car horn. Five minutes later, it repeated the long beep followed by the two short ones. I don’t think any of us thought it was accidental by that point.

  “It’s a signal,” Bonnie said. “Somebody’s trying to signal us.”

  “Yes,” I said, because it could be nothing else.

  We said no more about it. I had a cigarette with Bonnie, and Billy sorted through the refrigerator until he found a longneck Bud. He sucked it down in one long pull, wiping foam from his mouth.

  “Now I feel human,” he said.

  The horn sounded again and we all tensed. Somebody obviously needed help and, as silly as it sounds, there was almost a desperate tone to the beeping. The horn kept sounding at five-minute intervals. It put us all on edge. God knew we had enough on our plates about then. We weren’t discussing what was going on and I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. We were just waiting, maybe hoping it would all go away and we could put the pieces of our lives back together. The idea of that seemed even more terrifying to me than waiting for the things or the cables to come for us because it meant going back to a normal life without Kathy. It meant accepting her loss. It meant going on, struggling forward without her and I honestly didn’t think I had the heart for it.

  The darkness held outside.

  I think I was waiting for the moon to come out or for the stars to show. That would have signaled an end to hostilities, I figured. One of my greatest fears was that the darkness would never end. That dawn would come but the sun would never rise. That we would be forced into the existence of moles, of night scavengers who would never know again the light of day. The idea was horrifying. And being a science teacher, I knew that if the sun did not rise day after day after day, there would be no photosynthesis. The plants and trees would no longer process carbon dioxide and release breathable oxygen. I had an image of a dying, dark Earth, shrubs and forests and ferns and flowers all dead and withered, humanity suffocating on its own toxic by-products.

  The horn sounded again.

  “Why don’t they fucking quit it already?” Bonnie said. “We can’t help ’em any more than we can help ourselves.”

  She was right in a way, but Billy and I kept looking at each other and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: whoever was out there needed help and if we didn’t go to them we could hardly call ourselves human. There was death out there. But I feared that less than the idea of living with myself knowing I could have done something to help someone in need. The teeth of guilt are much sharper than any sword.

  “I wonder if it’s someone we know,” Billy said, not a question.

  “Could be,” I said. “If it was me out there, I’d want someone to help me.”

  Bonnie was watching us both by that point. “Don’t even fucking think of it. It’s too dangerous. We need each other. Nobody’s going out there.”

  The horn sounded again and I flinched.

  “Nothing out there,” Iris said, her mouth stitched in a scowl. “If you tell yourself there’s nothing out there, then there isn’t.”

  She was losing it so nobody commented on that. We just sat there. That was the worst part of it all: waiting. I knew the horn was going to sound again and when it did, I was going to scream. I didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t bear to hear it.

  But I heard it. We all heard it.

  “Fuck this,” Billy said. “Jon, you got any weapons around here? An ax? Anything useful?”

  “I got a few things out in the garage,” I said.

  “No,” Bonnie said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Billy sighed. “What if that was you out there?”

  “Then I’d get out of the fucking car and get somewhere safe.”

  “What if you were injured and you couldn’t?”

  She glared at him, but slowly her face softened. Bonnie was a good person. Despite certain malfunctions of character, she was inherently a good person. She was very kind when it came down to it. “All right,” she finally said. “Go then. Just be careful.”

  She kissed Billy before we left and I could see that she really didn’t believe she’d see him again. We took one of the flashlights and went out to the garage. Billy took the riot gun Bonnie had swiped from the patrol car. I took a hatchet and unscrewed the handle of my push broom. I sharpened the end of it until I had a serviceable pike.

  Then we walked out into the darkness.

  14

  There were cables everywhere. They dangled down like creepers in a primeval forest. Just the sight of them in the flashlight beam made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. Billy and I moved slowly, but we did move. We heard the horn again and it was coming from down the block. We began the terrible walk in its direction. The cables were inert, dead things. I knew they weren’t alive, not in the earthly sense of the word. They simply reacted when you touched them. Still…when we got too close to them, they trembled slightly as if they could feel us, sense our body heat or the vibrations of our footsteps.

  We gave them a wide berth whenever possible.

  As we walked, I wondered about it all. Once they had stripped away all the people—and all the native animal life for all I knew—and the world was empty, what then? Did they have a use for the planet? Were they snatching people off for study or was it a means to an end like miners stripping the rainforest to get at the valuable minerals beneath? What did they want exactly? And while I was at that, I wondered about the big one: who exactly they were.

  While I was lost in thought, blindly following Billy’s silhouette and the path of light he carved out for us, I nearly
stumbled into one of the cables. It was close. I came within a foot of it and it began to shudder at my closeness. I thought it was moving for a moment, but it wasn’t the cable but what was attached to it: bats. Dozens of ordinary, garden-variety brown bats. They were trapped on the cables, webbed in goo, flapping their leathery wings out of fright. I saw what had brought them in—the cables seemed to be covered in bugs of all sorts, mostly moths. Maybe there was something sweet about the secretions that attracted them.

  Billy stopped just ahead. “It’s going to get dicey now,” he said.

  How right he was. The cables were like a thicket of saplings ahead of us, dozens upon dozens of them waiting to snare the unwary. There was little more than a few feet among many of them. A forest of human flypaper. We moved forward and it was like threading through the spokes of a bike tire. We proceeded slowly, cautiously, both painfully aware of what would happen if that mysterious wind blew up again.

  Billy would shine the light about, finding the safest route, and then we would push forward, moving like men tiptoeing through a mine field. Ten minutes into it, I was soaking wet with sweat.

  The horn sounded again and we were getting closer to it.

  I was worried about what we would find when we got there. Neither Billy nor I had any medical training if it came to that. And the idea of trying to transport injured people through the jungle of cables was simply ridiculous. I didn’t know what we were going to find and I think my greatest fear was that we would discover an empty car and realize we had been baited in.

  The horn sounded again.

  Billy stopped now and again to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but other than that he kept us moving. When the horn sounded next, we were practically on top of it. The cables had thinned considerably by then and we weren’t in any immediate danger. Billy played the light around and I saw that we were very near the Andersen house at the end of the block where I had been earlier with Al Peckman. In the flashlight beam, I saw hedges, a bike abandoned in a yard, a newspaper on a porch waiting to be read…normal, mundane things that seemed so unbearably threatening now.