Behind the Fire: A Dark Thriller

by Susan May

  How stupid, thought Crystal… Aliens looking down upon them? She really needed to get a grip, and do it before she found John.

  Finally, after what felt like miles of running but which was only a few blocks, Crystal felt relief at the sight of the luminous, flashing “24 hour parking” sign up ahead. Below it, white and red-splotched reflections glowed in the glistening sidewalk. She stopped beneath it, at the entrance to the parking facility, and glanced around, once again searching for John or the car. It was uppermost in her mind how easy it would be for them to bypass each other.

  A couple passed her. From behind, she heard the automatic glass doors of the parking structure glide open as they entered. She couldn’t stand there forever. So, with a final check, she turned and followed them inside.

  Several people, along with the couple, stood silently in the aged yellow foyer gazing at the elevators. They looked toward her as she entered, before returning to their study of the finger-marked metal doors. Crystal stood to the side.

  The elevator arrived moments later, but the small space filled quickly, leaving no room for her. Her stomach danced as she willed the next to arrive soon. Floor numbers lit up in agonizingly slow motion, as one of the two elevators travelled back while the other continued upward. A jaunty chime announced one's arrival. The doors slid open. Even before she'd entered, the sharp smell of urine assaulted her senses. She took a deep breath and held it as she prodded the fourth-floor button.

  The elevator car moved rapidly to her floor. As it rose, so did Crystal’s annoyance. John had better have a good excuse for leaving her waiting, she thought. Along the way, she seen no sign of an accident, and she was certain she’d walked the way he would have driven back. That left a strong possibility he’d stopped for a phone call or to talk to someone.

  He could be forgetful—preoccupied was probably a more accurate description. Regardless of what had happened, though, how could he keep her waiting like that? They rarely fought, but this time, when she did find him, she intended to show him the upset his delay had caused her.

  The elevator arrived at the fourth floor, dinging loudly as it arrived. She shoved herself through the crack of the opening doors, breathing in the fresher air deeply. Her lungs were bursting; she’d only taken two breaths on the journey up.

  Looking about the mostly empty concrete expanse, she saw there were only a few cars intermittently dotted across the floor. She set off toward the stairwell on the other side. They had parked their car there and walked down—taking the stairs conserved power. The click of her heels on the floor as she hurried along strangely echoed her own heartbeat. She quickened her pace as she rounded the final corner pillar, hopeful it would reveal their car with John inside.

  The car was gone. The parking space where she felt certain they’d left the car was empty. She swung about, looking across the floor, double-checking she had the right place. Yes, this was right. There was a graffiti tag on the pillar next to their space, and she saw it was there.

  Her stomach tightened. Where was John? Her shoulders slumped in dismay. She didn’t even attempt to prevent her bag from falling from her shoulder and catching in the crook of her arm.

  They must have passed each other.

  Now John would be the worried one, when he discovered her gone from the theater.

  Crystal pushed her bag strap back onto her shoulder. Clutching it gave her a strange sense of security. It was something solid and familiar on a night that had so quickly turned to disarray. After one last furtive glance at the parking spot, she hurried back to the elevator. Travelling down, she saw no one. The parking lot this late at night had emptied quickly.

  The street greeted her with a glistening vacancy. Above her, open patches of sky revealed twinkling stars and a bright, fat moon.

  “Rain, rain stay away. Come again when I find John,” she sang under her breath. A panic was rising in her. Without concern about slipping or that she damage her shoes, she began to run back to the theater, puddles of water snatching at her footsteps.

  She thought about John possibly waiting in the car outside the theater, and imagined him wondering where she had gone. Serve him right for taking so long. Then the image disappeared, and the only thought in her head was how desperate she was to find him—and how she would climb in the car and hug him and scold him all at once. She knew her relief at finding him would override her anger at leaving her waiting. Maybe she’d even share with him that she’d imagined aliens had taken him.

  Suddenly, she found herself across the road from the theater. She’d been deep in thought, overwhelmed by her anxiety, and hadn’t realized how quickly she’d covered the distance.

  The theater was an imposing building, its sandstone glory brilliantly lit. A memory of the show that night caught her. The feeling of her hand snuggled inside John’s as she leaned into him, warmed her heart as she ran across the road, looking up and down the street. The city sounds grew silent, as if a giant plastic bubble had surrounded her. By the time she’d made it to the other side, she’d gone from happy to holding back tears. The street, though still filled with a few dawdling cars, was empty. John wasn’t there.

  Another ten minutes passed as she waited, until it became overwhelmingly clear staying there was pointless. If John were coming back for her, he would have been there by now.

  A crazy idea struck her: what if something terrible had happened, something to do with his research, and he was forced to rush home? Maybe he was waiting there for her, had sent her a message, not realizing she didn’t have her phone with her. What the emergency might be she couldn’t imagine, but where else could he be?

  It took another ten minutes of pacing the pavement before she managed to hail a cab. Now, thanks to the stress, she had a headache coming on. With each passing minute, it grew worse. By the time she stepped into the cab, a drum solo had begun inside her skull.

  ‘The rain,” said the cabbie, “the rain always creates chaos.”

  Forgetting your phone didn’t help either.

  The rain-blurred nightscape rushed by the window, filled with the fuzzy red-and-white outline of cars and streetlights. She sat in silence, hoping the driver would get the message she didn’t want to talk. In her lap her hands twisted together as if they had a mind of their own. If John wasn’t home, what would she do?

  As the cab entered their street, she craned her head toward the front seat to look ahead. Even at a distance, she could see their house was lit up, every light in the house turned on.

  He was home. A flush of joy and relief flooded through her, headache easing almost instantly. She paid the driver, but as she did she kept glancing toward the house. Something about it unsettled her. It was as if something very obvious stared right at her, but she was missing it entirely. She would worry later. Right now, all she wanted to do was get inside, find John, and hear what had happened. Even before the driver handed over her change, she’d leapt from the car and hurried up the front path.

  “John?” she called, as she flung open the door. John, where are you? God, you had me worried.”

  Silence. Stillness.

  She rushed through the living room to the hall, throwing her coat and bag over the sofa. Her bag missed the chair and fell to the floor. She didn’t stop to retrieve it; she just wanted to find John. Moving up the hall toward their bedroom, she continued to call his name. Even before she’d looked beyond the living areas, it became clear why he hadn’t answered.

  The house was empty. John wasn’t there.

  Crystal shivered, as if splashed with ice water. Something was wrong in the house. The moment felt like one of those pick-the-difference pictures—at first glance, everything looks identical but, under scrutiny, the mistakes become obvious. In Crystal’s mind there was no doubt something had happened in the house, even though everything looked the same as it had before they left for the theater.

  She walked back down the hallway, pausing at the key peg to check for John’s keys. Empty. Frighteningly empty. Disc
oncertingly empty.

  A feeling of strangeness tickled the back of her neck. Slowly she turned to look up and down the hall. John might not be there now; he might not have come home at all, but something told her someone had been in their house.

  As she moved quietly back down the hall to enter the kitchen, she looked around as she went for something with which to defend herself. On the kitchen counter she spied a block containing knives. Choosing the largest, she slid it out and held it before her. At the thought of using it on an intruder, her heart began to beat in double time.

  She moved back through the house, systematically checking each room. With each step she told herself she was being stupid, that she was imagining everything. What she needed to do was start calling hospitals, because John being involved in an accident was about the only thing that now made sense.

  First she would check the house, just in case. Just in case of what? She didn’t know, but she wanted to be sure she hadn’t missed a clue to what had happened to John. A note he had left, perhaps.

  Her hand shook as she entered through each room’s doorway, knife first, her heart beating so hard it sounded to her as if it were echoing off the walls. Each room was empty. No burglars, no axe murders, and no aliens greeted her—and, no John.

  After checking every room in the house, Crystal returned to the kitchen, putting the knife back in the block. She’d seen nothing out of place in her search, but the subtle feeling of wrongness crawled over her like a nagging itch. The culprit of her undoing tonight sat charging in its cradle on a side counter, its charge light flashing a merry green.

  Green. Green!

  The sudden realization hit her, and she immediately turned and ran to the study. Of course, now she knew what had felt so off. John would never compromise on his obsession with living “green,” as he called it. So that’s what she’d seen and felt from the moment the cab pulled up outside. If she hadn’t been so worried, she might have seen it immediately.

  In moments she was at the study door, flinging it open so hard it smacked against the wall and bounced back. She stood there, sucking deep breaths of air into her lungs, while her gaze travelled around the room.

  The bookshelf was untouched, the books standing neatly at attention, like little soldiers awaiting their next command. John’s collection of alien books had grown dramatically, she noticed, with many piled haphazardly, one on top of another. On his desk, papers filled with graphs and pictures perched precariously in piles. Fluorescent highlighters and several pencils lay scattered among the mess.

  His swivel chair sat empty, a reminder he was out there, not here with her where he should be. Crystal closed her eyes, willing John to be there. In her mind’s eye, she saw him sitting at his computer poring over the data streams from the field equipment located in Antarctica, Chile, Hawaii, Australia, and other far-off places she couldn’t even pronounce.

  It was the data streams that had snagged in her mind when she’d looked in here earlier, but until she’d thought about John's passion for green living, she hadn’t put it together. It was so glaringly obvious she could kick herself. How stupid was she? Stupid for forgetting her phone. Stupid for not bringing an umbrella. Stupid for letting John leave without her.

  John’s computer screen, black and silent, said more than any message he could have left her. The computer was never turned off. Even during a power failure, the external battery power source would kick in and keep it live. The data streams it received every second of every day were key to his work. He would pour over the inputs, recording anomalies, working the data, and tabulating results. He couldn’t afford to miss any of it, in case there was an anomalous transaction, as he explained it.

  Of course, his colleagues stored the data streams as well but, as John explained to her, they were so important they needed multiple backups across the globe in case any of the files were corrupted.

  If the computer was off, then someone had purposely turned it off—and that someone would never be John.

  If that wasn’t proof enough, she should have realized, even before she’d entered the house, the lights shouldn't be on in every room. In another home that might have been normal, but not when you’re living a green lifestyle. “Wasting electricity is a crime against the planet,” John would say, even if Crystal simply forgot to flick off a light switch. Very quickly, she learned to respect his passion on the matter.

  The two incongruences—the computer being off and the lights being on—collided in her head. She suddenly felt overwhelmingly lost. John was missing, and she had zero idea of his whereabouts… and somebody had been inside their house. This couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Crystal ran for the door, but this time she remembered her phone. As she did, she auto-dialed John, praying he’d pick up—but her call just went to message bank.

  It took the police less than ten minutes to arrive. Meanwhile, Crystal waited in the garage with the roller door up, watching the street. Every few minutes she’d call John’s mobile, but he never picked up. Then she started calling hospitals. With each call, furrows etched more deeply into her forehead, as increasingly more worrying scenarios evolved in her mind. Panic had become a bolting horse she’d lost the ability to control.

  A persistent, crazy thought kept knocking at the door of her mind: John’s “alien thing.” The more she dismissed it—telling herself she was just overwhelmed and simply out-of-her-head with worry, the more his U.F.O. tales nestled in and wouldn’t budge.

  Was it possible? She wished now she hadn’t stopped listening to him when he’d talked of the U.F.O.s. It was a silly quirk of his, so who would blame her for not paying attention? Then, what if it wasn’t?

  Unexpectedly, she remembered something he’d said. It had stuck with her because he’d seemed so sincere when he’d said it. He’d talked about it as if he’d seen it, experienced it. At the time she’d thought what a great storyteller he was.

  “They come at night,” he’d said. “It minimizes their exposure.” Something else he’d said had struck her as being somehow logical. She recalled how certain he’d seemed as he said the words: “They come more often during atmospheric disturbances.”

  Like rainstorms, she thought. Like tonight.

  The attending police had different theories. She answered their questions, growing wearier with each one.

  No. Nothing was taken from the house.

  No. They had not fought.

  No. She’d hadn’t rung his friends. He only had colleagues.

  No. They hadn’t had anything to drink tonight.

  And, no, No, NO … he’d never done this before.

  Finally … yes, she understood it was too soon to start worrying too much. She couldn’t convince them, if they knew John, it was soon enough to start worrying. He would never leave her waiting like that. Something had happened, but she could see she would never convince them.

  Then they were gone—just like John was gone—and she was alone. Again.

  Sleep did not come until just before dawn. Until then, Crystal lay in their bed, listening to the rain and the wind beat against the window just as relentlessly as the fear beat at her heart. Several times during the night she sprang bolt upright at the nocturnal creaks of the house, sitting there for long minutes, straining to hear if the noise was in fact John’s key in the lock.

  Occasionally, a flash of lightning flung back the smothering, thick darkness, and she turned to the empty space beside her and prayed for John to come home. Then, she also begged unknown beings to return her love to her; that seeming just as rational as anything else she’d imagined.

  Crystal cursed herself for not asking John what was now the only question in her mind: Do aliens return people after the rain?

  John slowly opened his eyes, taking in the dimly lit space surrounding him. Thirst was a razor in his throat. He swallowed, but his mouth was so dry and gritty it didn’t help at all. His mind felt filled with cotton wool, and he immediately realized he’d been drugged. With every ou
nce of energy he possessed, he willed his mind to clear, for he knew what would come next would require every faculty he possessed.

  The room was small. He estimated it at ten by six feet. It felt clinical and carefully designed, so as not to reveal anything about his captors. The walls and floor were made from a uniform polished-silver metal. It was sparsely furnished; the only objects in the room were the chair upon which he was sitting and four cameras, one in each corner of the ceiling.

  An instinctive attempt to stand brought the realization his ankles were bound to the legs of the chair by a kind of a soft plastic band. It was like a blue jelly conformed perfectly to the shape of his ankles and the chair. Straining against it caused the chair legs to slide on the metal floor. The sharp sound aggravated the headache he knew must be a reaction to the drug they had used to immobilize him.

  A darkened window, which he presumed was a two-way mirror, covered most of the opposite wall. On the other side, a team of them would be watching and studying him. He kicked at his restraints, and felt them give slightly and then return to their pre-existing shape.

  He wondered why they’d bothered to immobilize him. Surely they knew he understood there’d be no escape unless they decided to let him go once they were done. He smiled at such absurdity.

  Suddenly, a single blinding beam erupted from a small aperture above the screen, illuminating his face, and causing him to turn his head to avoid its sharp glare. A shrill tone resonated through the room so loudly his teeth vibrated. The surprise caused the muscles in his arms to twitch, but he displayed no emotion for them to record. From what he understood, they would certainly be measuring his responses, but he would give them nothing. He’d prepared for this day as much as he’d done everything he could to avoid it.