On came the dining room hanging lamp, followed by the kitchen fluorescent lights, the hall lights, the bathrooms lights, all the bedrooms lights, and every lamp in the house.
Her heart was going a hundred miles an hour. Now what? Now what? She wished she had let Cal stay over for the night.
Of course, that was it! Call Cal!
Bolting to her room, she grabbed her cell and speed dialed Cal. It went right to his voicemail.
“Hi, this is Cal. Do your thing at the beep. Or not, like I care or something.”
Camm groaned. She hated that message.
When the phone beeped, she shouted into it, “Cal, help me. I can smell it. It is here at my house! You got to help me!”
She tossed the phone onto her bed.
Should she call the sheriff? And tell him what? That a monster was out to get her, and she knew it was here at her house because it was stinky? That thought brought her up short. Even with the windows closed, the smell was getting stronger.
Where could she hide? Glancing around her room, Camm again caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, so panic stricken, so vulnerable, home alone in her Christmas pajamas.
Camm straightened to look at herself more closely. No, she wasn’t going to hide. It was time to get ready to fight. Grabbing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, she pulled them on over the top of her pajamas. Already, she felt less pathetic.
Now, the shotgun! She ran to her parents’ room. Lugging the shotgun and a box of shells back to the dining room, she dropped them on the table. Her hands shook as she loaded the gun. Glancing up, she noticed the sliding glass door again.
With the inside lights on, it became a huge mirror, and she couldn’t see a thing outside. She flicked the switch to the back porch light. It didn’t come on. Was the bulb burned out, or was the creature doing its thing to the outside light? Was it watching her now through the glass door?
She laid the gun on the floor to heave the dining room table onto its side, shoving it up against the sliding glass door, blocking it partially. The glass door still did not seem very secure.
She finished loading the shotgun, cocked it, flipped off the safety, and then backed into the hall, desperately trying to decide what to do next.
To her right, she saw the light in her parents’ room was off. Had she turned it off? She didn’t remember turning it off. Maybe she did unconsciously when she went down there to get the shotgun. Her dad was always griping at her about leaving the lights on.
Holding the shotgun at the ready, Camm crept slowly down the hall and peered into the bedroom. She was sure she had also turned on her parents’ bedside lamps, but now they were off as well. The master bathroom was also dark. She knew she had turned on that light. Reaching one hand carefully into the room, she flicked the wall switch up and down several times. The light did not come on. She tried to swallow, but her throat had gone dry.
The light in her dad’s office across the hall from her parents’ bedroom suddenly blinked out. Camm jumped around to face the office, pointing the shotgun into the darkness.
The hall lights began to grow dimmer. There were three ceiling lights running down the hallway, all on the same switch. As Camm looked up, the light above her head slowly turned yellow, then red, before eventually fading out. The next light down the hall did the same thing, and so did the next.
She dashed up the hallway to the dining room where she could see the remaining lighted rooms in the house. Her bedroom lights blinked twice in unison, then went dark. Her bathroom went black. The front room lights also blinked out. The fluorescent lights in the kitchen stuttered and blinked. They dimmed, giving off only faint gray light, before sputtering out completely.
Camm jerked this way and that, helplessly following each light as it died. The only light left on in the house was the overhead light in the dining room.
The dining room light was a simple chandelier that hung from the ceiling directly over the dining table. Three incandescent light bulbs, one at the end of each graceful loop, lit the simple, yet elegant fixture. The first light bulb slowly dimmed and blinked out.
I’m going to be left in complete darkness, she thought.
The second bulb followed suit. The last bulb—the very last bulb in the entire house—that was still lit slowly lost power. But just before Camm thought it was going to go out, it brightened, then dimmed again, then brightened.
It’s teasing me. This is some kind of cruel joke!
The last bulb finally exploded, showering Camm in sparks and glass.
All was dark, no lights anywhere. The darkness was stifling, hellishly so. Camm could see nothing. Her mind went blank; she had no clue what to do now, backing up against a wall.
She stood listening. There were sounds in the backyard, then at the backdoor. Now, something was at the sliding glass door trying to get in. Camm couldn’t see anything, but decided that if this were her last stand, she would go down fighting.
She was shaking so hard she could barely steady the gun. Raising the shotgun to her shoulder, she fired it in the direction of the sliding door. The glass burst out of its aluminum frame, and Camm heard it rain down on the back porch. After the boom of the shotgun, Camm could hear only ringing in her ears. Beyond the ringing, only deathly silence lingered.
Instinctively, she pumped out the spent shell and chambered another live round, ready to fire again. She wasn’t done yet.
“Holy hell, Camm, what are you thinking? You almost shot my head off!”
It was Cal.
As her eyes adjusted to the moonlight, Camm saw a silhouette of Cal’s bent form straightening up and stepping through the metal frame where the glass used to be, and over the now upside-down table.
Camm set the gun down against the wall and ran forward, grabbing Cal in a big bear hug. She buried her head in his chest, a sob or two escaped against her will, but she let herself cry for only a couple seconds. Stepping back, she dried her eyes on her pajama sleeves, and wiped her nose the same way.
“How did you know to come?” Camm asked, forcing her voice to sound normal in spite of the tight knot in her chest.
“My phone beeped, telling me I had a message—for some reason, it didn’t even ring. I thought it might be you. I came right over as soon as I heard your message.”
“Did you bring a gun?”
“No, I just threw on some clothes and ran over.”
“Thank goodness you came.” Camm whimpered a little, but got control of herself again. She was no longer shaking.
“You nearly killed me!” Cal was not over being almost blown to pieces. “I tried to open your backdoor, but it was locked. So I tried the sliding door, but it was locked, too. I was going to holler, but when I looked up, you were already pointing that shotgun right at my head. I barely ducked in time!”
“I’m sorry, so sorry, Cal, but it’s here. I can smell it!”
Cal nodded in the darkness. “So can I.”
He looked around. “Why haven’t you turned on the lights? Man, I’d have every freakin’ light in the house turned on by now.”
“I did, Cal. I turned on every light in the whole house, and it did its thing. You know, it made them all go out. One by one every light went dark.”
Cal strode over to the light switch and flipped it up and down a few times. Nothing happened. “I think it’s still here.”
Camm followed him. “What do we do, Cal? I don’t want to lead it back to your house. Your family’s there. We can’t just stand here in the dark waiting for it.”
As if on cue, something rustled in the backyard. Cal hurried to pick up the shotgun Camm had left leaning against the wall. He checked to make sure it was loaded, cocked, and ready to fire.
They stood close together, peering into the backyard. Suddenly, a noise came from the front of the house. Something was scratching on the front door, banging against it. Both jumped and whirled around to face the front.
Feeling vulnerable from behind with the glass door gone, Cal swung th
e shotgun to the back, and then again to the front. He twisted back and forth, not knowing which direction to face.
“Camm?” he whispered hoarsely.
“Why are we whispering?” she whispered back.
He cleared his throat. “I don’t know,” he said, speaking normally. “Don’t your folks have a gas stove in the kitchen?”
It took a fraction of a second for Camm to realize what he was saying. She ran into the kitchen and turned on a burner. The flames sprang up, leaping to glorious life. She proceeded to turn on the rest of the burners all the way up. The kitchen and dining room were now lit by a dancing firelight.
Camm glanced up at Cal, who had followed her into the kitchen. “Cal, we have a gas fireplace, too.”
They raced to the front room to stand before the fireplace.
“What do we do now?” Cal wondered.
“There are artificial logs in the hall closet.”
Cal sprinted through the kitchen into the hall, and back to the closet across from the front door. As he opened the closet door, bending to get the logs, something banged against the front door so hard it almost came off its hinges.
Startled, Cal fell over. Righting himself, he saw that Camm had secured the deadbolt when she had locked the door. As he watched, the reinforced door bowed in, an incredible force pushing against it. It might just pop out of the frame any second now.
Grabbing several artificial paper logs, Cal raced back into the front room. Sliding the metal screen aside, he dumped all the logs together on the fire grate.
Camm knelt down by the opening. “This will make a big fire.”
Cal patted his pockets. “We need a match. We need a match!”
“The fireplace has a gas starter,” Camm replied.
As another loud bang sounded from the front door, Camm jumped to her feet, grabbing Cal’s arm.
“We need a match, and we need it now!” Cal’s voice increased in volume until he shouted the last word.
Frantically, Camm ran into the kitchen, grabbed a supermarket ad out of the garbage, and rolled it up. She stuck it into a flame on the stove and ran back to the fireplace with her improvised torch. Cal already had the gas turned on, so she threw the burning paper under the grate. The gas ignited with a big SWOOSH, and all the paper log coverings simultaneously burst into flames. Within seconds a roaring hot fire burned brightly in the fireplace, so Cal turned off the gas.
The banging on the front door stopped.
“What do we do now?” Camm asked. She sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose at the distinctive odor of rotten eggs. “I can still smell it. I think the odor is getting worse.”
“I do, too,” Cal responded. “It may be coming around to the back. Where is the shotgun?”
“You had it last. Where did you leave it?”
“I think I left it in the kitchen.”
Camm ran to the kitchen, which had turned dark; the burners were now black holes in the darkness. The hissing sound of escaping gas filled the room, the air smelling of gas.
Quickly, she switched off all the burners. She tried turning one back on, but it wouldn’t ignite. Frustrated, she grabbed the shotgun from off the kitchen counter and ran back to the front room.
“The gas burners in the kitchen don’t work anymore,” she informed Cal. “Thank heavens for the fireplace.”
Before Cal could respond, the fireplace dimmed as if a fist was enclosing the fire, squeezing it toward oblivion. The flames flickered in and out, back and forth; a battle raged between the fire and an unseen force trying to extinguish it. As the battle wore on, the unseen force seemed to be winning. The fire weakened, and weakened some more, its flames shrunk, almost guttering out.
But they didn’t.
Just as the fire faded to red coals, Camm turned the gas starter back on, and the paper logs suddenly burst up again into bright, roaring flames.
“I think you saved it,” Cal said, as the fire continued to burn unabated with a fierce intensity.
Anxiously, Camm gazed around her. “Where do you think that thing will attack from next?”
“Maybe through the missing glass door, but we should be safe if we stay close to this fire.”
Camm nodded as she watched their shadows on the wall, dancing with the flickering light of fireplace. The cheerful yellow glow of the fire suddenly looked red, then changing from red to blue, and back to red again in a consistent pattern. The whole room was pulsating between red and blue.
What is that creature doing?
Suddenly fearful and confused, Camm pressed in close to Cal. He didn’t seem to mind, so she took his hand and squeezed it. “Cal, why does the room keep changing colors? Is this some kind of new trick? What is that monster doing now?”
She looked up at him intently, and he smiled down at her in a knowing way. “It’s the emergency lights on the sheriff’s car that has just pulled up out front. The cops are here.”
XIII
Both Camm and Cal huddled close to each other on the couch in the front room, watching Deputy Todd scribble more notes. It was after two a.m., and the fire in the fireplace was slowly dying. For an hour they had been answering the deputy’s questions. Camm’s backyard neighbor, old Mrs. Tobler, who made it her business to keep track of everyone else’s business, had heard the shotgun blast shatter the glass door, and had called 911. All emergency calls were routed through San Bernardino, and Todd, the senior deputy, had been rousted out of bed to investigate. He was not too happy about that, and it showed.
Upon his arrival, Todd had meticulously inspected every inch of the house and yard without disclosing what he was looking for. Cal, who had more experience dealing with the police, had taken that opportunity to whisper instructions to Camm. “If Todd asks you a question you don’t know how to answer, you should just say, ‘I don’t know, Todd. I was just so scared.’”
Camm hissed back, through gritted teeth, “I’m not giving that answer! It would make me look like a silly wuss.”
Cal shrugged. “I know, but it will work.”
Camm stubbornly avoided using Cal’s tactic, even though it seemed the deputy was trying to wear her down by repeatedly asking the same basic questions.
Looking up at Camm, Deputy Todd frowned. “I’m still not sure I’ve got this right. Tell me again why you tried to shoot Cal?”
“I didn’t recognize him,” Camm wearily began again. “I heard someone sneaking around outside and tried to call Cal. When he didn’t pick up, I got out my dad’s shotgun. Then, I heard someone trying to get in through a locked door. Thinking it was a burglar, I shot at him. I would never have fired if I’d known it was Cal. The shotgun blast probably scared the real prowler away, but Cal stayed to be sure the prowler didn’t come back.”
The deputy tapped his notebook and nodded thoughtfully. “And he calmed you down by building a huge fire. Okay, but what about that terrible odor around the house that smelled like a hundred rotting corpses? I was sure I’d find at least one dead animal of some sort in the yard. Got any ideas you’d like to share on that?”
Both Camm and Cal shrugged, looking mystified.
The deputy sighed. He seemed to be getting tired, too. “Okay, I want to hear again why every light in this house was out when I drove up, and how all the lights came on simultaneously as I walked up to the front door. You initially didn’t turn on the house lights because . . . ?”
Camm meekly answered, “I was afraid someone outside would see me through a window and realize I was here all alone.”
Todd raised an eyebrow and nodded with pursed lips. “And then the two of you—just the two of you, no one else was here—turned on all the lights throughout the whole house at the same time because . . . ?”
Now, it was Cal’s turn. “Well, we turned on the lights in the front of the house first, and then the lights in the back. When we saw your car out front with your police lights flashing, we knew it was okay to turn on the rest of the lights, because we really did want the police to know we
were here.”
“And the two of you were able to turn on all the lights in the front of the house, in several different rooms, all at the same time. That’s your story? Just the two of you did it?”
“Please, deputy.” It was Camm again. “We turned on all the lights, but we didn’t say we turned them all on at the same time. And yes, it was just the two of us. Nobody else was here.”
“I saw what I saw, young lady.” Todd was frowning again.
“I’m sorry, deputy, I mean no disrespect. But it was just the two of us turning on lights. I can’t help what you saw.”
Camm’s comment did not improve Todd’s frown. He was about to say something more when his cell phone rang. He excused himself and stepped out of the room to talk privately.
“You’re getting pretty sassy with the police, young lady,” Cal whispered, nudging her gently with a big smile.
Camm rolled her eyes in exasperation. Cal was enjoying this too much. “How many times do we have to tell him the same thing? If he doesn’t believe us, he can put that in his report. I can tell you, I’m about done here.”
Deputy Todd walked stiffly back into the room and handed his cell phone to Camm. “We were finally able to reach your parents in San Francisco. Your father wants to talk to you.”
After Camm took his phone, the deputy walked into the dining room to talk to Cal’s parents, who were waiting for him there. The deputy had awakened them earlier to join in the excitement. Camm gave her father an abbreviated version of their story with several interruptions as he asked her questions. “I’m sorry about the glass door, Daddy, I thought it was . . . Well, no, Daddy, I didn’t know who it was, but . . . I know I could have killed him. I wasn’t trying to, it’s just that . . .” Camm sighed, and after her father’s next comment, exclaimed, “I don’t know, Daddy, it’s just that I was so scared!”
That seemed to satisfy her father and drew a stifled laugh from Cal. She stuck her tongue out at him as she hung up.
Cal stood up and yawned. “Well, at least I didn’t kill an innocent sliding glass door and almost kill my neighbor.”
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