Sheri stopped him from having to figure out the end to the sentence. “What’s that?” she said, and pointed at the TV.
It was dim. It was fuzzy. But it was visible. In the background, to the side of the house, near the garden area, something flew over the privacy wall. Then another thing.
“What…?” said Drew. He leaned in close to the TV, his brows so close together it was like they were getting ready to brawl.
Jerry was standing farther from the TV than anyone, but he was the one who knew what it was before anyone else. Probably because he was the one who had had the most recent contact with what they were seeing.
“It’s the neighbor,” he said. “It’s Ted!” And he gave out a quick bark of joy.
Ann spared barely a glance at his outburst before she looked back at the television. Another branch flew over the wall.
“So?” she said.
“He’s always complaining about the dog and the kids’ stereos.” Now it was Sheri that turned to look at him. Her gaze was a study in blank confusion, “So?” written across it in lights so bright he was surprised they didn’t send illumination throughout the house.
“So… he’s always complaining about what we’re doing in here,” Jerry said. Sheri kept staring at him, joined now by Drew and then Ann. None of them got it.
Jerry smiled, the grin feeling almost like an interloper, a stranger that had somehow accidentally made its way to his face and, now here, didn’t really know what to do.
But the smile reflected itself on the three faces before him when he explained; when he made them understand:
“He can hear us.”
39
Jerry ran to the front door. It was only a few steps, only thirty feet to get from the living room to the sealed portal. Last time he had been here hope had been obliterated. Now he felt it reborn like a phoenix, taking flight as he began battering at the thick wood of the door, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Help! Help us!”
The rest of the family joined him immediately, Ann and the kids crowding around him and pounding on the door and shrieking as well. Screaming not in pain or panic but for the promise of an end to this waking nightmare.
They kept screaming, screaming, screaming. So loud that Jerry felt like his ears were going to burst, so loud that the idea of Ted not hearing them became an impossibility.
The quality of Ann’s shouting shifted. It took a moment for Jerry to realize she had ceased her wordless wailing and now shouted something as loudly as she could.
“Wait!”
Jerry stopped screaming, but didn’t halt his attack on the door. The kids kept on shouting, kept on beating on the door as though it represented all that was evil and malicious in their world, an enemy that must be destroyed.
Ann was pointing. Behind them. The TV.
“What is it?” Jerry said, shouting himself to be heard over the ongoing din that Drew and Sheri were making.
“It stopped!”
“What?”
“It stopped!”
Jerry didn’t understand. But as he stared at the TV, he saw what she had seen.
The branches weren’t flying anymore. Ted had stopped his bombing assault of Ann’s garden.
He was done. He was gone.
But then Jerry spied something and realized that Ted wasn’t finished. He had simply paused. Simply regrouped at what he thought was an escalation.
Jerry put himself in the man’s shoes: he’s throwing branches over – presumably to irritate the irritating neighbors. And as soon as he does, they begin irritating him in precisely the manner he most hates: with an increase in noise levels.
So does Ted leave? Does that beautiful, wonderful prick of a human being give up? No way. Not Ted.
No, he goes to his shed or garage, and gets what Jerry was now seeing.
“Louder,” he said to the kids.
“What?” said Ann. She hadn’t spotted it. She would.
“Louder!” And Jerry started screaming again, but did so with an eye on the bigscreen TV that still showed the side of the house. Still showed the termite tent. Still showed Ann’s garden. Still showed the wall.
And now showed two pieces of metal, peeking over the top of the wall.
“What’s that?” said Ann.
Jerry smiled and motioned her to start yelling. She did.
It was a ladder. Ted was coming over the wall. For retribution, no doubt. But that was fine, because Jerry knew that the man would eventually – if they kept up the noise – have no choice but to call the cops. And the cops would save them.
40
Watching Ted come over the wall was almost comical. Jerry tried to stop the laughter at first, as though his subconscious thought it inappropriate to allow mirth or merriment at a time like this. His hand slapped over his mouth, stifling the panic-ridden laughter. Then he pulled the hand away. Laughter was good. And it could only enrage Ted further. Which was also good.
The out-of-shape man climbed the ladder, his torso well above the ornate metal ironwork that topped the wall itself. He looked at the spikes on the wall, and even at this long angle Jerry could see the man debating whether or not this would be worth it.
“Louder!” Jerry screamed. The kids already sounded hoarse, but they coaxed another decibel or two out of their screams.
That seemed to cinch it. Ted levered himself over. Carefully as he could, but his t-shirt still snagged on one of the spikes on the ironwork. He yanked at it, yanked at it.
“Oh, no,” said Ann. But it wasn’t fear in her voice. It was the disconnected vocalization you utter when a character in a comedy is about to get smacked in the groin.
Ted’s testicles were safe, but his t-shirt ripped a moment later and he plummeted to the ground, apparently having forgotten to hold onto anything while he unstuck himself.
THUD. There was no sound, but Jerry fancied he could almost feel the guy’s frame slam to the soft earth of Ann’s garden. He worried that Ted might have broken his back or neck – then where would they be – but a moment later the guy rolled over to hands and knees. He shook his head, then muscled himself to a standing position.
Jerry saw Drew look at the TV, then redouble his pounding and screaming, spurring his sister on to greater volume as well.
Ted put hands on knees, panting. Then he looked at the house and shook a fist. He screamed at it. Jerry could only imagine he was cursing the family for going on vacation and leaving the television on so loud.
Then Ted began running around in tight circles, doing a small kick-leap in the air every few steps. He looked like a dog that had forgotten where it hid its bone and gone suddenly, starkly insane as a result.
“What’s he doing?” Drew said. Or screamed. He was clearly unwilling to let up his vocal barrage for even a second.
Jerry realized that Ann, however, had stopped screaming.
“What is it?” he shouted to her. But before she could answer, he realized: the camera angle was shifting. Moving so that Ted was more in the center. Zooming in on him. As it did, Jerry realized that Ted’s apparent insanity was mere rage: he was trampling Ann’s garden with the intensity of a zealot. But Jerry cared less about that fact than about the question that rose in his mind:
Who was moving the camera?
A moment later, the camera stopped its adjustment. Ted was well-centered in the picture, now, the main subject in a well-framed shot. He had stopped his mad dance and now held a stick he yanked off one of the nearby bushes, and he was swinging it like a scythe at anything over a few inches high. Greenery flew like Ted was some strange new model of wood-chipper. He was laughing.
Then Jerry saw it. And he could tell from the gasps around him that the rest of the family did, too.
Something moved in the background of the shot. Something dark. A shadow with no features, just a dark blot on the larger darkness of the night.
Moving carefully toward Ted.
41
He got there fast. So fast.
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That was the first thought in Jerry’s mind as he saw the dark form approach the wrath-sodden man in their garden – the man who could be their salvation. It was a sidestepping from reality, he knew, focusing on the fact that their jailor – and he had no doubt that the shadowed form he was seeing was just that – was incredibly fast, since he adjusted the camera and then was behind Ted only moments later.
No, he’s just got a remote. Lots of cameras have those. He was probably circling around behind Ted the whole time he was adjusting the camera.
Jerry had to force his mind away from that. It wasn’t important. What was important was that Ted, their only real chance at a way out since this had started, was in imminent danger.
Nor did Ted seem aware of the threat. He was still whacking away with his switch, beating now on a small rosebush that Ann had planted and spent huge amounts of time pruning in spite of the fact that it had yet to offer up a single flower.
The form, the shadow, the Stranger – and that was how Jerry was going to think of him, he knew, the foreign being that had forced its way into their lives – flitted forward. Still dark, still featureless.
Within ten feet of Ted.
The Stranger moved, and Jerry saw that their captor was holding something in his hand. A branch? Perhaps a baseball bat? Either way it looked solid and substantial.
The Stranger was only five feet away from Ted.
Ted was focused, utterly and completely, on the destruction of the barren rosebush.
“Look out!” Ann screamed.
But of course, Ted couldn’t hear. He swung his stick again. The few remaining leaves on the rosebush erupted upward…
… and as though in counterpoint the Stranger slammed his own club down.
Even with no sound, Jerry could almost hear the crunch. Then the second crunch as the Stranger jerked his club loose from the indentation it had created in the back of Ted’s skull.
Ted reeled, his head suddenly concave where all had once been convex. Blood streamed down his forehead and face in crimson waterfalls so thick and dark they seemed almost unreal.
The family was no longer screaming for help. Drew was the only one still banging on the door, but he was doing it mechanically. Bam… bam… bam…. Like his mind had short-circuited at the sight of what was going on outside and had rebooted to its last command sequence.
Bam… bam… bam….
Onscreen, Ted took a pair of drunken steps. Reaching for the Stranger. Not to attack, Jerry could tell. For support. Ted’s brain was shutting down, his legs going limp.
He started to fall.
Bam… bam… bam….
The Stranger caught him.
And dragged him out of frame. Now all Jerry and his family could see on the television were the ruins of Ann’s garden, and shadows.
Silence ruled, save only for the muffled sound of Drew’s robotic knocking.
Bam… bam… ba –
Jerry reached out and gripped his son’s wrist. Drew’s arm went limp, as though he had just been waiting for someone to do that, to stop him, to stop the course he had taken but had no strength to step away from himself.
They all watched the television. Jerry didn’t know why. It showed nothing but a piece of their backyard. Nothing but empty space where hope had existed only a moment before.
Ann screamed. Then so did Drew and Sheri.
Jerry didn’t scream. He didn’t know if he had it left in him. Even though he jumped where he stood, even though his skin felt like it was curling off his bones in parchment-ribbons.
Because there was Ted again. His bloody face had dropped into the picture, and the Stranger must have picked him up and carried him closer to the camera, because his battered face took up nearly the entire frame, his jaw at one edge of the viewable space and the now-misshapen curve of his head at the other.
Up close, he looked far worse than Jerry had realized he was. Blood covered his face in a gruesome death mask. His right eye had hemorrhaged massively, only the barest hints of his normal eye color visible through the red that coated it like a Halloween contact lens.
The other eye was unmarked. But it stared at nothing, and somehow that perfect but unseeing eye was far worse.
His mouth moved, and Jerry could see that most of the teeth had been smashed out of his jaw by the Stranger’s clubbing.
“What’s… what’s he saying?” whispered Sheri.
“No sound,” said Ann.
But Ted was mouthing something over and over and over as he looked into the camera but saw only dead space.
“Help me,” said Drew. Jerry looked at his son. “It’s what he’s saying.”
Jerry looked back at the screen. Drew was right. “Help me,” Ted was silently pleading, over and over.
Then Ted’s bloody mouth opened even further. His good eye rolled back in its socket.
“What’s happening?” said Drew, his voice quavering.
Jerry knew. He’d seen it on patients coming in for emergency operations –
(though not on her, you never saw it on her face, did you, Jer-Jer?)
– and he knew exactly what was happening. But he didn’t want to say. Didn’t want to say that Ted was screaming. That the Stranger hadn’t finished with their neighbor, and must be doing something unspeakably painful to him, just out of sight of the camera’s eye.
A new flood of blood erupted from Ted’s mouth. He convulsed, moving off camera before a black-gloved, blood-spattered hand pushed his face back into view. The hand kept a hold on Ted’s hair so the man couldn’t jerk out of frame again. Jerry noticed that the hand was holding not just hair, but chunks of yellowish matter that must be pieces of Ted’s shattered skull clinging to his scalp.
Ted screamed his soundless scream again. He coughed. Blood spurted from his nose and his eyes.
Then he was motionless.
A moment later the Stranger’s hand jerked Ted out of frame.
The camera angle widened again, moving back to its original shot of the house, the backyard, the trees, the wall.
The pool.
A light breeze rippled the colorful tent that lay over the house, as though a mocking spirit were reminding them all that they were away from the feeling of any such life-giving zephyrs.
Then the televisions – all of them, every television in every room of the Dream House that had become his family’s nightmare prison – turned off.
They were alone again. In the dark. And their only small sliver of hope had just been murdered in front of them.
42
Jerry sensed movement beside him and in the dim glow of the flashlight that Ann still held he saw Sheri and Drew clutching at one another. He looked at his wife. Wondered if she would move to him. Wondered if she would seek comfort in his arms the way she had before….
She didn’t. She just swung the flashlight back and forth so quickly it looked like an amateur laser show at a garage band concert. She wasn’t going to come any closer, he knew. Not now. Maybe not ever.
And that’s what you deserve.
“He lives alone.”
Jerry jerked, startled by the thin, high whisper that had come from his daughter. She sounded like herself, but also not. As though a pale version of his daughter had insinuated itself among them in the past few moments. A shadow, a wraith that was meant to bring to mind remembrances of what was.
Jerry shivered. He wondered if Brian was here, too. Watching on a plane that they couldn’t see, couldn’t understand.
“He lives alone,” Sheri said, and though her voice remained small and breathless, her gaze was rigid, focused. Still, it didn’t make her look strong, only brittle – her eyes shifting to shards of obsidian in the pits of her skull, dark glass waiting to crack and splinter.
“Yeah,” said Drew.
Apparently Sheri didn’t like his tone, because she stepped away from him, and in a weird moment Jerry saw how much Drew and Sheri resembled him and Ann. He wondered if that was something too late to fix.
“You don’t get it,” said Sheri. “He lives alone. No one will look for him. No one is coming, no one will look under the tent….”
Her words spun off into silence, swallowed by the vast sepulcher that had replaced their house.
Strangers Page 12