Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Blood had splattered and splashed over all available surfaces below the bed. The bedspread itself was fine, tousled due to Jerry and Ann sleeping in it, but fine other than that. Below that façade of normalcy, that thin veneer of the banal and the commonplace, all was a travesty, an inverted slaughterhouse where blood fell in steady streams.

  Ann was still shrieking, the flashlight dancing in her hands like it alone could hear some mad, wordless tune that must be followed until death came to relieve the dancer.

  In the mad-flash-streaking light, Jerry saw the blood. Glimpsed the corpse. Saw the body ripped and ragged, the face unrecognizably slashed and battered and cut.

  The Killer had peeled the poor victim’s face away from his skull in long, careful strips that curled against his neck like a macabre banana peel.

  The still-ringing cell phone was jammed in the cadaver’s mouth, too-white teeth clamped around it in a death-lock that struck Jerry as horribly obscene.

  At the same moment that the phone rang again, Ann screamed something unintelligible. She hurled herself backward, away from the bed, away from the phone, away from the body and the song that came from the dead man’s teeth.

  She punched at her phone as she slid away from the bed, jabbing at it repeatedly. Jerry didn’t understand why she would do that, not at first. Then the ringtone that still emanated from the dead man below the bed cut off suddenly and when the silence dropped he knew. Ann needed to turn off the song every bit as much as she needed to get away from the shredded corpse under the bed. She had to stop the ringing. The singing of the phone.

  Sheri screamed, a tiny half-scream that was almost a punctuation mark, the period that delineated the end of the song. And more than that, it seemed to send Ann into even deeper terror, and Jerry saw his wife drop the flashlight.

  It spun wildly across the floor, pitching the room from darkness into the lightning storm of a strobe light. Suddenly Jerry could see everything and nothing at once. There was only darkness and the dead eyes of a corpse with a cell phone jammed into its mouth, only darkness and the terrified faces of his children screaming as they saw what monsters had come for them, only darkness and the face of his wife as she looked with eyes that were wide and terrified… and knowing.

  Jerry reached for the flashlight as it danced its mad dance across the floor. His hand was shaking. No surprise there: the bigger surprise would have been if his hand hadn’t been shaking. But in spite of the tremors that gripped his muscles he managed to snag the flashlight. Hefted it. It felt good in his hand. It felt real, a tiny shred of truth in a world that had shown itself to be little more than layer upon layer of thin fantasies created by a delusional god.

  Jerry heard screaming. Ann. And not just Ann, but Sheri and Drew, as well. Screaming again… or had they ever stopped? Had they just started screaming when Ann first looked under the bed and kept on until now?

  Jerry flipped up the dust cover. The trio of screams behind him rose in volume and in tone, a sudden crescendo that startled him nearly as much as the view of the man below the bed.

  Jerry swallowed dryly. He wondered how long it had been since he’d drunk anything. He remembered having that wine with Ann on what he perceived as the night before this. But it really could have been anytime. Days, weeks. A month.

  The corpse looked at Jerry with a stare that was impossibly wide. The skin of its face had been peeled away, including its eyelids, so the yellowing eyeballs seemed to hang in the middle of a perfect pit of nothing, suspended in a void for the sole purpose of rendering accusation, of leveling judgment. “I shouldn’t be here,” the corpse seemed to be saying, “And I certainly shouldn’t be dead. Just like Brian, Jer-Jer. You kill everything around you, don’t you?”

  Jerry gasped and looked away. He wondered if the rest of the family could see what he was thinking. They had to be able to, he reasoned. They had to see his failure, his pain.

  His guilt.

  Jerry looked away from the staring eyes of the dead man. But he didn’t dare look to his family. Instead his gaze fell upon the wooden box that Ann had brought out of the closet.

  A fine box. A good box, beautifully crafted. The kind of thing you got because you wanted it to last. The kind of thing you got for a husband on an anniversary.

  Or for a lover, just because.

  Jerry glanced back at the bed. He didn’t lift up the dust cover again, but he glanced back and that was more than enough. Then he looked at Ann. She had finally stopped screaming, she and the kids now pushed against a wall as far from the bed as they could get. The kids were whimpering, crying.

  Ann wasn’t crying. Wasn’t whimpering. She was just staring. Staring at the bed. At what lay below it.

  Jerry stepped toward his wife. “Ann?” he said. She didn’t look at him. Her eyes remained stuck where they were. “Ann, who is under our bed?”

  Both kids heard him. Drew and Sheri both flicked their gazes to him, then looked at the box, then at Ann, then back at the box. He saw comprehension dawn in their eyes.

  Ann didn’t acknowledge him at all. She just stared at the bed

  Jerry took another step. “Ann, who is under our bed?” he repeated. The words came out sharper this time, as though they were knives he was honing to a finer point each time he spoke them. Like they were weapons he intended to use to murder someone.

  “Ann, who is under our bed?”

  He pointed the flashlight at her face, like a cop interrogating a suspect. She didn’t even squint, though he could see the kids lean away from light. And he knew he had gone off his rocker. He should be concerned about whether what had happened to the guy under the bed was going to happen to all of them, rather than being consumed with who it was.

  But who it was… that was all that mattered. It was the one question that existed in his mind, the one issue that would drive him past the walls that contained him. Not the walls of the house, but the walls of madness, the walls of insanity that had been pressing closer and closer since this all began.

  So close he could touch them now. So close he could feel the moldering paint flaking off like leprous skin. So close that he had nowhere to turn. The madness was everywhere. Everything.

  “WHO IS UNDER THE BED?”

  He didn’t even know who he was talking to. He was alone in a dark place, completely isolated with no company but his blackest fears, his deepest regrets.

  A girl stepped into the darkness with him. Illuminated only slightly by the wavering glow of the flashlight he held, at first he thought she was the girl, the girl –

  (no, Jer-Jer, no, it can’t be, can’t be, don’t even hope that)

  – until she stepped closer. Threw her arms around him in an awkward half-hug. It was the first time Sheri had hugged him since Brian had died. Maybe longer. Jerry stiffened at first, and Sheri must have felt his body’s resistance because she started to move away from him. But then she came close again, as though forcing herself to breach the walls that had sprung up between them. She held him and said, “Dad, please, not now. Please, let’s just get out of here. Please.”

  The world seemed to brighten, and as it did Jerry realized how perilously close he had come to losing his mind.

  He wondered if the others were that close. If the others might break as well.

  He looked at Ann, still holding herself as she sat on the floor far away from the bed – far away from the flayed man under the bed. She didn’t look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the dark slit between the floor and the hem of the dust cover. The doorway between the light Jerry held and the pitch darkness where lived – existed – the literal monster under the bed.

  Jerry swung his flashlight to Drew. His son was looking at him with an expression that mirrored the one Sheri wore. What was it? Jerry couldn’t place it for a moment, it had been so long since he had seen it on either of his kids’ faces.

  Then he realized: it was trust. Confidence. The hope that a parent – that Dad – could get them out of this. Could make it all better.
>
  Jerry nodded. He pushed Sheri away. Walked to Ann.

  She still didn’t meet his gaze, but tried to scuttle away from him, like a bug that had been caught in the open and now lurched for the sanctuary of the shadows.

  Jerry caught her arm. He didn’t do it angrily, or with too much force. “Ann,” he said, and his voice was as calm and firm as his grip. His children were counting on him.

  She finally looked at him. “Wh-what?” she managed. Her eyes were dark, and he thought he saw in their depths reflections of collapsing walls, of madness drawn near. He hoped it wasn’t too late for her. For all of them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and held out his hand.

  50

  Jerry was surprised when Ann misinterpreted his movement and reached to take his hand. He wanted to shout, wanted to scream at her, to ask if she really thought he was going to just hold hands and all would be forgotten, all would be forgiven.

  He didn’t though. He reigned in the urge; just shaking his head and moving his hand out of reach. Now confusion filled Ann’s expression.

  “Wha…?” she said, then followed his finger as he pointed at what she still held. Her lip curled. “This is what you want?”

  “It can get us out, Ann,” said Jerry. He tried to remain calm, tried not to point out that she had no reason to be angry with him right now, mere seconds after the discovery of an infidelity that looked to be long-lasting and involving not just the body but the mind and the heart.

  Ann slapped the cell phone into his outstretched palm. “Fine,” she said. Jerry thought for a second she was going to spit at him, but she reined herself in and sat with legs crossed, elbows braced on knees and head resting on her hands.

  She looked bereft. Pitiful. In need of comfort.

  Jerry turned away from her. Whatever she might need, she would have to get it somewhere else.

  He looked at the phone Ann had been using to call… whoever it was. The phone was a cheap disposable model, the pay-as-you-go kind that was favored by terrorists – and apparently adulterers – as being virtually untraceable.

  The phone still had power. The orange screen – nothing fancy, just a basic screen – said the name of the phone company and showed that there was phone reception here. Which unnerved Jerry in a way: he had fully expected to see a lack of reception, not the all-clear he was seeing.

  “Dad,” said Sheri in a “why-don’t-you-go-ahead-and-do-it” tone of voice.

  He nodded.

  Pressed “9”…

  (and this was where someone would jump out of the closet with a mask and a machete and murder them all where they stood, but no, no one came out the closet stayed dark and they all waited waited)

  … then pressed “1”…

  (if no masked man then certainly bugs or rodents or some kind of nightmare creature some beast from the oubliettes of our minds but there was no scrabbling at the doors no scratching at the walls only silence and breathing)

  … then pressed “1.”

  Jerry felt his muscles relax. He knew how people running from snipers must feel, like every step was a miracle, and when they made it to safety it was like they could see the face of God for the first time.

  He smiled at Sheri and Drew. “We’re outta here,” he said.

  He pressed the “Send” button.

  But in the instant that he did, the phone darkened. The orange screen went black. The backlit buttons turned off.

  Drew said, “What is it?”

  Jerry looked at the phone. It had turned off. The call hadn’t completed.

  He pressed the power button. The phone turned on, but only long enough for the orange screen to blink the words “Charge Battery” at him. Then everything went black again, and when he hit the power button it remained dark.

  Jerry cursed under his breath.

  “What?” said Sheri. “What is it?”

  Jerry looked at Ann. “Where’s the charger?” he said. She didn’t answer, and for a moment it looked like she was being almost petulant; sulky. Like she had been caught cheating at a game and now wanted to take her balls and go home.

  Rage flew on red wings in front of Jerry’s vision. For her to act like this, now, when everything was on the line, when she was the only one that knew the way out….

  You wanna kill her, Jer-Jer?

  He forced his hands, which had clenched into tight fists, to loosen, maintaining only enough tension to keep hold of the cell phone –

  (Ann’s cell phone, her love phone, don’t forget, the phone she’s been screwing around behind your back with for who knows how long)

  – and then saying, in words as slow and clear and calm as he could manage, “Where is the charger?”

  Ann looked at him, and he thought he saw a flash in her eyes. A number of emotions. Anger, then embarrassment. Then fear. Then terror.

  The terror wasn’t of the house, wasn’t of whoever was doing this. Not in this moment. No, he realized, she was terrified of him. And that scared him.

  Even more frightening was how much he enjoyed seeing her fear at that instant. How much he thought she deserved it, and how much it refreshed him in the darkness of the home that had shattered around them and reformed to become a rock-solid tomb.

  51

  Jerry let his gaze fall away from Ann first. He didn’t want to scare her too badly; and more than that, he didn’t want to give in to the part of himself that desperately wanted to be let loose and become what she feared. Jerry could feel it there, a very real part of him struggling to get out and forget about the problems facing the family and simply solve the one problem at hand, the one problem close enough to deal with, the problem of an unfaithful wife.

  Jerry tamped that feeling down. That wasn’t who he was. Or at the very least, it wasn’t who he wanted to be.

  Just get out, just get the kids out. Just get everyone out.

  So he looked away. Looked away from Ann, and in so doing forced the beast within him to crawl back into the dark confines of his heart, back into the deep places where he hoped it would die and be forgotten.

  It seemed to be the right thing to do, because as soon as they had broken eye contact, Ann crawled away. Not far, not beyond the small circle of light provided by the flashlight. Just to the box.

  Jerry felt his anger building again as Ann put her hand in among the letters and ribbons, the tokens of love.

  Then he realized that her movements were changing. She had grown jerky, frantic. Like the fear that had gripped her gaze had moved now to partial control of her muscles, creating of her a disobedient puppet of flesh and bone.

  “Not here,” she mumbled.

  “Not there?” said Jerry. “What do you mean, it’s not there?” He advanced on her again – or on the box. It was hard for even him to tell. They both seemed to be glazed in red, steeped in crimson tones that foretold some horror that would come upon each in turn.

  “I mean it’s not here,” screamed Ann. She cast half the contents of the box out in a large handful. Letters, envelopes, ribbon. No charger. “Someone took it out!”

  “Who?” screamed Jerry. He didn’t know why he was asking Ann. How would she know? How could anyone know anything of what was happening in here?

  Ann looked like she was going to answer him, was going to fight him even. Like maybe she was going to use him as a punching bag to rid her of whatever personal demons had driven her to hide her dreams not with her family, but in a box in the closet.

  “Dammit!” he shouted. He threw the defunct cell phone into the darkness that ringed the family. It disappeared into the night-black that held sway over most of the room, thunking against a wall somewhere. Silent. Gone. Nothing. “Dammit!” Jerry shouted again. Louder this time. As though by raising his voice he might raise an idea, might bring out some way to escape.

  Someone cleared a throat. It sounded almost silly, melodramatic in the terror-filled atmosphere of the bedroom. But it worked, Jerry supposed, because both he and Ann swiveled to look
at its source: Drew.

  “There is another phone in here,” Drew said. “One we could use.”

  “Where?” said Sheri.

  Drew looked at the bed. Jerry didn’t understand for a moment, then he realized that his son wasn’t looking at the bed. He was looking under it. At the dark space under the dust ruffle, the black place where a corpse hid. A dead man whose face had been peeled off…

  … and a cell phone jammed in its mouth.

  Jerry looked at his son. Drew looked half proud of himself, half sick at the idea of what he was proposing. “And we know it works,” he said, “we heard it get an incoming call.”