The laptop stayed dark.
He put the power cord back in. Still nothing.
Sheri started to wheeze. Jerry looked at her with concern. She was staring at the now-black laptop screen like she was worried it might come alive and attack her.
“Princess?” said Jerry. “Sheri, let’s stay calm.”
Ann and Drew pulled closer to Sheri, and Jerry could see them struggle through their own fear to reassure the teenage girl.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” said Ann.
Drew reached out and touched his sister’s hair, almost petting it. “You don’t want to end up in the hospital again,” he said.
That seemed to get to Sheri. Her breathing slowed. She managed to pull her gaze away from the dead eye of the laptop. She looked at Jerry. “Actually, being in a hospital doesn’t sound too bad right now.”
Jerry had to agree with her.
Sheri looked around as though their home had become a beast, a strange leviathan that had swallowed them all in the night. Her gaze started to jerk around erratically, and Jerry was about to put his own hand on her shoulder, about to try calming her as well, when Ann pulled Sheri away from him.
The motion stung him. But only a moment, because in the next instant he realized that Ann wasn’t really pulling Sheri away from him, but from the laptop. Turning their daughter away from the screen.
He turned and flipped the laptop closed. There was no help there.
The fear among them had increased. He could practically see it, crawling among them, breathing terror into their minds. And it was only growing. Only getting stronger. They were going to break soon. They were going to –
And at the moment when Jerry was most certain someone was going to go mad, at the moment when he knew they couldn’t take this anymore, Drew screamed.
An instant later, so did Ann. And Jerry, spinning around, wanted to scream himself. Because they weren’t looking at each other. Nothing had happened in the room.
No, they were looking… away.
They were looking outside the office.
They were looking outside, down the hall.
They looked like something was coming for them.
26
“Holy crap,” Sheri shouted. “What the –” she broke off suddenly as Jerry rushed to join them.
“What is it?” he said. His voice was trapped between a shout and a whisper, like he didn’t know whether to be stealthy or try to frighten away his fear with anger.
Sheri stood silent.
But she slowly…
… raised…
… her finger…
… and pointed down the hall.
At the far end of the still mostly-dark hall was an extra room, one that Ann used for crafts and sewing and the rest of the family used as a “miscellaneous storage” room. A place for things you might want to get to easily, but probably wouldn’t need in the next few weeks.
The door to the room was open.
The room was dark.
And barely visible in the dark room: a figure. Shadowed. Motionless. A tall man-shape in a dark coat, a hat pulled low over his face.
He was watching them.
Jerry felt a plum-size knot in his throat, and wanted to swallow but was afraid if he did he’d start coughing and wouldn’t be able to stop. Not a good time to start choking on his own fear.
“What do we do?” asked Ann.
“Call 9-1-1,” said Drew, his voice strained, panic tightening his vocal cords like overstretched harp strings.
“On what?” Sheri spat. “Your Etch-A-Sketch?”
“Quiet!” Jerry half-barked.
He thought. He looked around, thinking. No one else to call, no way to call anyone else.
It was up to them. The family was all there was.
Shit, he thought.
But out loud he called, “Hey!”
There was no movement. The figure just stood there, watching. Watching. Jerry felt like the skin around his testicles was starting to crawl. He wanted to puke. The figure, he realized, had to be close to seven feet tall.
“Stay here,” he said to the rest of the family.
“You’re kidding,” said Ann.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. Part of him was glad she was resisting the idea of letting him brace the intruder alone. But he knew it was his job. His responsibility. He was the father. He was supposed to keep the family safe. “I’m just –”
“No.” Her voice came out loud, probably louder than she intended or expected, and everyone looked down the hall.
The intruder had not moved. He was still watching. And for some reason that was worse than if he had been rushing at them like an insane fiend from hell. An attack Jerry would know how to react to. He probably wouldn’t last long in a fight against someone that big, but at least he would know what to do.
But being watched like this….
“No one goes anywhere alone,” Ann insisted.
“But…,” Jerry began.
But I’m supposed to do this. It’s my job. My chance to make things right. To atone.
He didn’t say any of that. He nodded. And as one, the family tiptoed down the hall. Someone turned on every light they passed, pushing back the darkness that had come into their home, forcing it to retreat, foot by aching foot.
“Hello?” Jerry said. “Hey! Hey!”
Still the darkness reigned in the room at the end of the hall. And still the figure watched. Silent.
They reached the doorway.
The hall was bright, and the light sent a cone of yellow illumination into the sewing room. But the figure was standing against the back wall. Motionless, still cloaked in shadows, hat still low.
Dark.
Deadly.
Frightening.
Jerry raised a trembling hand. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
Behind him, Drew mumbled, “We don’t want you to hurt us,” under his breath.
Jerry did his best to ignore that, continuing, “I’m not going to come in, just….” He reached his shaking hand into the room. “… just want to turn on the light.”
He flicked the switch.
27
The light came on.
The intruder was shown.
And Jerry… laughed.
A moment later, Drew did, too. Then Sheri. Ann last of all, like she was resisting the urge. But finally she started chuckling as well. Soon they were all hooting and howling in a near-hysterical release of pent-up nervous energy.
The intruder still stood there. All seven feet of him. Made of wood, wearing a coat that had been thrown on his thin frame, a hat put on his hook-head.
He was a hat rack.
The laughter went on for what could have been minutes, or could have been hours. It seemed to drain everything out of Jerry. Not just the fear, but the adrenaline burst of energy he had enjoyed for the trip down the hall. He didn’t feel at all ill anymore – thank goodness – but he felt weak and drained. He suddenly remembered the funeral. The numbness, the sensation of having nothing left to give anyone.
He felt like that now.
The others quieted as well.
Ann straightened. He saw her looking at something. There was a window in this room, too. The blinds pulled back as they were now pulled back from all the windows.
Like the windows in the bedrooms, the windows in the living room, this one was black. They still floated in a nothingspace of sunless void. They were still cut off. Alone.
Jerry touched her elbow, then gestured for her to follow him. She nodded, and he led the family back into the living room.
The lights blazed here, the heart of the house. But though it was bright, he only had to look over his shoulder at the floor-to-ceiling windows to see that the brightness was an illusion. Their home was infected with some malignant force. Something he didn’t understand and couldn’t begin to deal with.
“What’s happening, Mom?” said Drew.
Ann had no answer. She just looked do
wn at her feet, then up at the ceiling as though searching both Heaven and Hell for answers and finding nothing in either plane.
Jerry turned away before anyone asked him that question. He tried to open the two end windows, just as Drew had. Neither yielded.
On the second window, Jerry felt his movements grow frantic and jittery. He knew he was losing whatever semblance of control he had managed to maintain to this point. And part of him knew that he couldn’t afford to do that; couldn’t afford to lose command of himself, when he had already lost command of everything else –
(everything, Jer-Jer, even the ability to keep people alive)
– in his world.
Rage gripped him. He spun and grabbed a wooden chair that sat near the windows, an antique piece that he and Ann had bought as one of their first-ever “nice” purchases when the money finally started to come in. When their lives had seemed perfect.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Getting us out,” said Jerry.
He turned to the window. Reared back with the chair held in both hands, ready to crash it through the dark glass. Part of him feared to take that step. What if there really was nothing outside? What if he swung, and instead of granting them escape, he merely allowed the void to enter, and take them?
Then he threw off that concern. This wasn’t The Twilight Zone. There was an explanation for this. There was a world outside.
And he was getting his family out.
He swung the chair.
28
CRACK!
Jerry had his eyes closed, his body half-clenching in automatic preparation for the explosion of glass it was sure must be coming. So it took a half-second for him to realize what had happened.
He looked at the window.
It was still intact. Still whole.
Still dark.
He looked at his hands. He was still holding the chair. Parts of it. The two legs were gripped tightly in his fists, the varnished wood smooth against his sweaty palms. The rest of the chair had fallen to kindling and lay in pieces on the floor beside him.
“What happened?” he said dully. He felt stupid, like his IQ had just dropped by half or more.
“The chair just fell apart,” said Sheri in a voice that Jerry would have expected to hear from someone who had just witnessed Christ turning water to wine. Only this miracle was a different kind of miracle. A dark miracle. “It just broke.”
“Why would the chair break?” said Drew. He, too, sounded shocked. But where Sheri’s voice was tinged with awe, his was tinted by terror.
Jerry dropped one of the chair legs. It fell to the top of the heap of wood beside him and he was visited by an image of bone falling on bone, of skeletal remains cast aside by a predator that had stripped them bare and sucked them dry.
He felt the end of the leg. Not the bottom, where it sat on the floor, but where it had parted company with the rest of the chair.
“It feels like… like it’s been sawed through. Or is it ‘sawn’? I can never remember.” He had to quash a giggle. His mind still wasn’t working.
“Sawed through?” said Drew, and the tint of terror became a fully-rendered painting of panic. “What do you mean SAWED THROUGH?”
“Who would do that?” said Ann, speaking almost on top of Drew.
Jerry couldn’t think. He could only move. He dropped the remaining chair leg and grabbed another chair. Even older. Finer. More valuable, purchased well after the ornamentation of this life had become second nature.
It, too, fell apart in his hands.
The panic that had been drawn across Drew’s features now communicated itself fully to Jerry. He whirled through the living room. He grabbed end tables, chairs. Anything small enough to pick up, but big enough to throw through a window.
A moment later, Drew joined him in his mad quest.
Everything collapsed. Nothing held.
Ashes, ashes, it all falls down.
There was only kindling, only bits of nothing that had once been furniture and appointments and decorations. Only wood and plastic and metal that was good for nothing but a reminder of how meaningless their lives had become, how when it was taken down to its basic pieces, it served them not at all.
Ann watched, clearly blown away. Sheri took deep breaths, her hands clutching her shirt with knuckles that glowed white, then letting it go, then clutching it again.
Jerry moved to the baby grand. He tried to move it. Couldn’t.
“Drew!”
Drew came over. Even together, the instrument was too heavy.
“The couch!” shouted Drew.
They each went to an end of the couch. Jerry recognized in his mad dash that this was ridiculous – wasn’t even the leg of a chair enough to smash the windows out? – but he was gripped by a panic so severe it bordered on hysteria. It wasn’t just about getting out right now, it was about finding out how deeply their world had been cut apart, how completely their life had been destroyed.
Jerry bent over at his end of the couch. Gripped under the heavy piece of furniture. Lifted.
Jerry was braced for the weight of the piece. So he almost threw out his back when it came up far too easily. Then it fell out of his hands, and he stared with mouth agape at the six sections the couch had been cut into.
No one moved.
Jerry was panting, Drew gasping for breath in the aftermath of their activity. Ann watched them with eyes that looked haunted.
Sheri was taking breaths that were clearly conscious attempts to remain calm. She looked like a yogi in a battlefield.
Other than the breaths, though, all was silence. But not the silence of peace. It was a heavy silence, the kind of silence right before a bullet fires, the silence before a tidal wave rushes over land and sweeps away everything in its path.
Sheri finally spoke. “How could someone have done this? All this? In one night?”
Then she screamed. Jerry did, too, and he thought Drew and Ann joined their voices to the banshee chorus. But he couldn’t be sure.
Because in that instant the lights – all the lights, everywhere in the house – had all gone out, and it was as though the perfect black outside the windows had made its way in and taken them into its harsh and loveless embrace.
29
Jerry heard something. Movement. He held up his hand, but couldn’t see it. It was right in front of his eyes, he knew it, but he couldn’t see it.
He had never been in this kind of darkness before. He felt blind; would have worried he was blind, if it weren’t for the fact that the others were all moaning and groaning as well, crying in the black that had clutched them all in an instant.
The movement continued, then a clatter. Drew cursed, and Jerry realized his son was moving around. He couldn’t figure out what his son was doing, but then he heard a familiar tic-click tic-click and realized his son had found one of the small lamps that had sat on the end tables – the end tables recently by the sofa, now in piles of wood next to pieces of what had once been a sofa – and was flicking it on and off, on and off, on and off in the hopes that it would chase away the terrifying black that had enveloped them all.
“The lights aren’t working,” Drew muttered. Then he said it again louder, and then he shrieked the words, “The lights aren’t working!”
Jerry wanted to reach out to the boy, to comfort him. But he couldn’t tell where his son was in this perfect darkness, and not only that but he feared there might well be no real comfort to be had.
Then, just as fast as they had gone, the lights came back. They couldn’t have been off for more than a minute, but Jerry blinked and held a hand above his eyes like a man who had been trapped in a mine shaft for months – or years.
Ann was standing stock-still, her mouth moving like she was praying to herself. Drew was, as Jerry had thought, bent over the bits of the end table and held a lamp in his hands.
Sheri was hyperventilating. Her face was a uniform shade of white.
The sight galv
anized Jerry. He couldn’t lose her. Not his Princess. Not like he had lost Brian.
He didn’t think. He just acted. He spun and lashed out with his fist. Punched the nearest window.
Strangers Page 9