“It’s probably pointless, but I’ll check the phone upstairs,” he said.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, not wanting to be alone, and unable, too, to understand her onset of anxiety.
In the master bedroom, another telephone sat on the nightstand. As Thomas had guessed, that one was also dead.
Another club of thunder hit the night. It was the most powerful crash Linda had ever heard; the force of the reverberation actually knocked her off balance. Gripping the dresser for support, she peered outside a window. The sky sagged under the weight of heavy, oil-black thunderclouds. Lightning throbbed against the backdrop of the heavens, resembling the luminous veins and arteries of some huge, otherworldly beast.
She turned to Thomas. “The storm could have knocked out the phone lines.”
“I can’t recall that ever happening,” he said. “The electrical lines, sure, I’ve seen that. But the phones? That’s a new one. The storm started only a couple of minutes ago.”
‘Well, what else could it be?”
Thomas did not answer. He glanced at his watch.
“The second hand’s stopped,” he said. “Check your watch, Linda.”
She looked at her Timex. It read 9:14, and the hands were frozen.
“Mine has stopped, too,” she said.
“Good Lord,” Thomas said. “I don’t believe this.”
“You’re thinking of what Jason said earlier, aren’t you?” she said. “Something about it being dangerous when the clocks stop and thunder rumbles.”
“Exactly. I don’t know what any of it means, but I remember his advice.” He opened the closet and removed a wooden case from the top shelf. He opened the box.
Inside, a .38 gleamed darkly.
“A precaution,” he said when she looked at him questioningly. He carefully took the revolver and several bullets out of the case. “Jason warned us to arm ourselves. I don’t know who—or what—we’re up against, but we’d be crazy to ignore his advice.”
“I guess that now you believe everything he said.”
“This is some strange shit, baby. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m clueless. I don’t want to believe Jason’s story, but it looks like he was on the money.”
“I hope he was wrong. Judging from what he said, someone might try to attack us.”
‘We’ll be ready.” He loaded the ammunition in the revolver. Ordinarily, the sight of guns made her nervous, but she was grateful that he was prepared. She wished she had a gun of her own, though she had no idea how to use one.
“What’s our plan?” she said.
“Get to my car phone. Call his friends. If they can’t give us any answers, we call the cops.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said.
Like God clapping His mighty hands, thunder blared.
A gust screamed—a haunting, humanlike cry.
Then a fury of rain hammered the house. Clattering, splashing, and hissing, it was most intense cloudburst Linda had ever witnessed.
Clutching the .38, Thomas went to the doorway. While Linda waited near the bed, he ducked outside and checked both ways.
“All clear.” He returned to her. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here. The longer I stay here, the more worried I get. I know something’s happened to that boy. I don’t want to waste a second messing around.”
“I’m right behind you,” she said.
They moved outside the bedroom and crept toward the stairs, Linda searching in every direction for a threat she could not name, in a house that seemed nothing like the place she called home.
Brains neither heard nor felt the portentous thunder when it first struck. Sitting on his bed, he paged slowly through a family photo album. He stopped and stared for long stretches of time whenever he found a photograph in which Shorty appeared. His grief, as potent as it had been that morning when he had seen Shorty’s baseball cap spin out of the supernatural hole, had rendered him oblivious of the outside world.
In every picture, Shorty seemed happy. Although he had been photographed in a variety of places—in front of a roller coaster at Six Flags Great America, near a heap of gifts at Brains’s tenth birthday party, eating barbecue at a cookout a few summers ago-his cheery, easygoing nature had been captured flawlessly in each photo. Except for Brains’s own memories, nothing reminded him so poignantly of his missing cousin.
No. Not missing cousin. Dead cousin. Because Brains had not witnessed Shorty’s death, part of him harbored the hope that he was still alive, maybe trapped in some corner of Thunderland. But it was only dumb, childish optimism. Mike’s body had been discovered downtown, near Northern Road. He was dead.
Dead.
Brains wondered when he would be able to accept Mike’s death. He kept believing this was a nightmare from which he would awake to find that everything was okay.
He turned the last page of the photo album. Sighing, he closed the book and placed it beside him on the rumpled bedspread.
He lay on his back, gazed at the ceiling.
He felt dead himself. Hollow, numb, weak. He did not want to do anything. He only wanted to lie there and breathe.
Nevertheless, the pistons of his brain fired up again. For the first time that day, his thoughts advanced past pondering Shorty’s death. He asked himself what he was he going to do.
He had to do something. Although he had never experienced the loss of a loved one, he intuitively understood that mourning, as proper and natural as it was, had its limits. Eventually, one had to salvage the pieces and move on with life. Brains could no more wallow forever in grief than he could stay submerged underwater for eternity. While it might ordinarily be acceptable to mourn Mike for a long time, with the Stranger on the prowl, Brains couldn’t afford to-or else he might share Mike’s fate.
What was he going to do?
Call Jason? Would that do any good? Most likely, it would not. Jason was probably as lost and grief-stricken as he was.
What was he going to do?
Suddenly, he heard thunder.
He bolted upright in bed. He checked his watch.
The digits had stopped at 9:14.
He jumped to his feet.
The question of what he was going to do had gained new urgency. He was in Thunderland. He had been so immersed in grief that he had not realized that his surroundings had changed. He could not afford to zone out like that again.
Reminding himself that the Stranger had quit the game-playing and had begun to kill, Brains decided that, first of all, he should arm himself. Jason had said that whatever a person imagined in
Thunderland instantly became fact, but Brains could not put his faith in something like that. He needed something solid. A gun.
Cautiously he left his bedroom. He slunk into the dimly lit hallway.
In the real world, his family had been downstairs talking. Now he heard only the storm: thunder rolling, rain hammering the roof, wind buffeting the house. Being alone here frightened him, but he was thankful that his family had been spared the horror of this place.
He went into his parents’ bedroom, switching on the light as he entered. He pulled out the nightstand drawer. A shiny .45 rested within, the final and ultimate element of his father’s extensive security preparations.
He took out the revolver. It was loaded. He found extra ammunition at the bottom of the drawer, inside a case. He filled his pockets with ammo.
He was not sure whether the weapon would hurt the Stranger. But he felt safer.
Feeling as exhausted as he used to be after a long day of work in the Mississippi cotton fields, Sam Weaver stepped outside shortly after nine o’clock, holding an icy bottle of Heineken in one hand and a bag of roasted peanuts in the other. Every Fourth of July, after the guests had left his home, he liked to sit on the patio and watch the town’s fireworks. After his tiring cookout-managing duties, he needed to unwind. He also derived a childlike delight from the colorful, creatively arranged explosions.
With the patio light
shut off so he could enjoy the pyrotechnics to the fullest, darkness gathered around his property. He navigated his way across the deck to the glass-topped table, placed his snacks on top, and sat in a wicker chair.
He noticed the empty seat beside him. Lena, his deceased wife, used to enjoy the Independence Day fireworks with him. He was so accustomed to her company that sometimes, after an especially awesome explosion, he would turn to that seat, expecting to see excitement on her lovely face—only to find that she was not there. He had been a widower for seven lonely years, but he retained an assortment of habits from his married life.
Sighing, he looked away from the chair. He took a slow swallow of the cold beer. Delicious.
He searched the dark sky. The light show had not begun yet. He glanced at his watch. It read 9:14.
Although the event was scheduled to begin at nine o’clock, he was unconcerned. The folks might have been mired in technical difficulties. On one such occasion, the fireworks had started thirty minutes late, and that year’s display had been the most spectacular ever, as if the park district had decided that it needed to outdo itself in order to compensate for its tardiness. If another late start would result in a show half as exciting as that other one, he did not mind waiting a little while.
He leaned back and relaxed, alternately sipping beer and eating peanuts. When nothing had happened in the skies, he checked his watch again: 9:14.
He frowned. That couldn’t be right. He had read his watch earlier—at least five minutes earlier—and it had flashed back those same digits. Hadn’t it?
He held up his beer. Could the alcohol have muddied his perceptions? No, the bottle was half full, and anyway, he wasn’t such a sap that one beer could have set his head spinning. Too much booze was not the source of the problem.
He did not relish the idea, but perhaps the problem was in his own mind. He was sixty-eight and evidently in good health, but he was plenty old enough to creep into the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. He lived alone, which meant he could already be having all kinds of lapses and not be aware of them. This incident could be only one in a series of mental missteps, notable primarily because it was the first time he saw proof of his affliction.
Sweet thought, Sam.
Then again, he might be getting carried away. The watch could simply be malfunctioning. He tinkered with the buttons. The digits did not change.
Apparently, the problem really was in his watch, not in his head.
Thunder resounded through the night.
Alarmed, Sam looked up. Gas-jet blue lightning flashed, the stark light briefly illuminating the backyard. Another rumble of thunder rolled across the sky.
Wasn’t this the perfect unwinding session? Something happened that made him temporarily fear that he was a step away from the nearest nursing home, and then a thunderstorm ruined all hope for the fireworks. Lord have mercy, he should just take his old, tired butt to bed.
A cold gale swept across the deck.
Like boulders colliding, thunder banged.
The air suddenly felt heavy with pent-up rain.
He quickly got up. He grabbed the peanuts and the Heineken and fled inside the house by way of the sliding screen door.
The instant he shut the door, rain fell. It did not begin slowly; it began in a torrent, striking the glass with a fury that brought to mind Biblical lands flooded by forty-day-long downpours. No doubt, if he had been a second later getting inside, he would’ve been drenched.
Darkness filled the kitchen. He dropped the bag of peanuts on the counter beside him, walked to the light switch near the refrigerator, and flicked it on.
His dead wife was sitting at the dinette table.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sam’s hand, in the process of lifting the beer to his lips, halted at his chin.
Although the bottle was ice-cold, he abruptly felt much colder.
It was Lena, his wife, who had been in the grave for seven years. Lena, dressed in a bright-yellow blouse, her long black hair curly and lustrous. Lena, her face youthful and beautiful, her brown eyes shining with the love they had always held whenever she had looked upon him. Lena, sitting there watching him quietly, seemingly as real as the tile on which he stood.
Sam thought he felt a heart attack coming on. He touched his chest. His heart still beat, but it pounded wildly.
A moment ago, as he had sat on the deck pondering the frozen watch digits, he wondered whether his mind was breaking down, and he had decided that his fears were baseless. But this disconcertingly realistic vision of Lena proved that something truly was wrong with him. It had to be mental disease, Alzheimer’s—something like that. He refused to consider any other explanation. Because any other explanation would drive him crazy in earnest.
The hallucination of his wife spoke: “Sam, do you recognize me? It’s Lena.”
Pangs twisted through his heart. The damn thing’s sweetly musical voice sounded exactly like Lena’s.
He suspected that talking to a creation of his own mind might endanger his fragile mental condition, but perhaps by speaking to it he could dissolve it, in the same manner that a police negotiator could use words alone to persuade a violent criminal to surrender.
“I know who you are,” he said, and he was pleased to hear that his voice was strong, controlled. “And I know what you are. You’re an illusion. My real wife is gone to God.”
“I’m not an illusion, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m really here. The good Lord knew how much we missed each other. He brought me back so we could be together again.”
“God doesn’t work like that.”
“God works in mysterious ways, sugar.”
“Not in those kinds of ways,” he said. “You’re only a creation of my own mind, a ghost I dreamed up. I want you to go away. Now.”
Instead of vanishing, the Lena-illusion pushed away from the table and walked around it.
He saw that the illusion, which mirrored how Lena had appeared in her mid-thirties, wore high-cut white shorts that showed off the wonderful figure she had possessed at that age.
It began to walk toward him.
Sam had been holding the beer bottle loosely. He tightened his grip around the neck.
“You’ve missed me, haven’t you, sugar?” the Lena-illusion said, slowly drawing closer. “You’ve missed me a lot. Especially at night, haven’t you?”
“I told you to go away.” He raised the bottle.
It continued to come closer.
“Yes, I know you’ve missed me at night. You’re tired of sleeping alone in that big, cold bed. Aren’t you, baby? Don’t you miss us keeping each other warm at night? Don’t you want us to hold each other again? Don’t you?”
He kept telling himself to fight this sick fantasy, but his resolve was crumbling. Since Lena’s death, he had not had a sexual relationship with another woman, for he believed it would be an act of infidelity. But thoughts of sex occasionally visited him. He was older, but he certainly was not dead. Sometimes he wondered how it would feel to hold a woman again. How it would feel to kiss. To make love.
“Don’t you?” the Lena-illusion said. Smiling seductively, it continued to close the gap between them.
He struggled to suppress his sexual urges and think rationally. He must not allow this thing to seduce him. Sex with a hallucination? Lord, that would propel him into complete madness. The only way to preserve what sanity he had left was to resist the pull of his libido and somehow get this alluring specter out of there.
“No,” he said in what he prayed was a firm voice. “No, I don’t want to touch you again. Stay away from me.”
The Lena-phantom ignored him. It came closer, stretching its delicate hands toward him.
“Come to me, Sammy.” Its slender fingers groped for him, only inches away. Terrified of the touch of this nameless thing, he dropped the bottle and ran.
With the surefooted swiftness of a man half his age, he flew up the winding staircase, streaked down the hallway, and
slammed into the bathroom. Shut and locked the door. Gripped the sink with sweaty hands, gazed into the basin, panting.
He had never been so disturbed.
How could his mind have conjured such a thing? Was he that ill? Sweet Jesus, if he had plunged this far over the edge, who knew what might happen next?
Chills swam like icy eels through his veins. His greatest fear had always been losing his mental stability, his presence of mind. Because he’d learned at an early age that a man was only as strong as his mind, he had spent his life educating himself, developing his powers of perception, and strengthening his will. To be tormented by hallucinations was a nightmare of tragic proportions.
To dispel the inner coldness, he turned the faucet handle, releasing warm water into the sink. He bathed his face.
After washing, he dried himself with a towel. He examined his face in the mirror. He looked tired but normal, not at all like a man who would be haunted by sick illusions. Better still, his racing heartbeat had slowed.
Nevertheless, tomorrow morning, he would visit his doctor. He loathed going to physicians, but letting an illness of this degree go unchecked was tantamount to driving blindfolded on an expressway during morning rush hour. He was in grave peril—from himself.
Booming thunder made the bathroom walls tremble. Rain rapped the window.
Out of curiosity, he checked his watch. It still read 9:14. Obviously, its battery had run down. Tomorrow, he would go to the jewelry shop and have the watch repaired.
He needed another drink, something more potent than beer. It was never his habit to deal with stress by consuming alcohol, but right then, nothing would have been as pleasing as a stiff shot of whiskey—a double shot, perhaps, to knock him out until morning and spare him the terror engineered by his own mind.
He opened the door.
An acrid smell filled the hallway. He looked to the spiral staircase. A large mass of noxious-looking black smoke churned up the stairs.
What was this? Fire? No, it could not be. Although the smoke roiled in thick waves, it retained its basic shape and did not dissipate like ordinary smoke. A blaze was not the cause of this; this was something else. Another hallucination?
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