Worship the Night

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The static sound grew louder, and as he turned into his living room his suspicions were confirmed. A pale gray glow radiated from his dated model TV, its screen showing only a field of sparkling, gritty static. His television looked like a box filled with millions of frenzied, angry little flies.

  “Bastards,” Anderson muttered, next turning to check his telephone. He didn’t expect a dial tone when he lifted the handset to his ear, and sure enough there was none, but instead he heard soft, fizzing static. This wasn’t the first time his phone had been cut off, so this static instead of dead air seemed irregular to him. Well, in any case he still had his cell phone, and he had no plan for it that might be canceled; he just added minutes via cards purchased at the supermarket.

  After locating his latest unpaid service bill he tapped out his provider’s number on the cell phone’s keys, but when he sent the call and lifted the little device to his ear, instead of the automated menu he expected would greet him he was simply met with more static. Just as on his home phone.

  Murmuring a less articulate curse than before, Anderson studied the phone’s tiny screen, saw that he still had seventy minutes of air time. He punched in the number again. Listened again. Static.

  “What the fuck?” he hissed, his first thought one of conspiracy. Somehow, they had cut off even his cell phone! But how was that possible? No, that was illogical. He decided to try another number. His parents were both deceased, but he had a sister in New London, Connecticut...

  Static.

  Okay, he considered, maybe because it wasn’t a local call. Randomly, he tried his favorite pizza restaurant, just a short walk from his apartment, because it was an easy number to remember (and if they answered, well, a pizza delivery was always a good thing). But even though he knew the pizza place remained opened until ten at night, not only was there no answer, but there was nothing at all except that now familiar sound of millions of trapped flies.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Anderson complained, shoving the phone across the kitchen table in disgust.

  He turned toward his computer, its screen black in sleep mode. His only remaining window on the world, at least in the technological sense. He moved to it, impatiently roused his monitor to brightness.

  His desktop image was a photo of himself with his wife taken at Acadia National Park in Maine. They had asked another vacationing couple to take the picture for them. They were standing in front of Jordan Pond, at its far end the softly rounded twin peaks nicknamed the Bubbles. He almost winced when the photo materialized, and wondered why he tormented himself with it.

  Tammy had been diagnosed with breast cancer at twenty-seven. Anderson had held her hand through it all: the double mastectomy, the hysterectomy, chemotherapy, radiation. But the cancer, even more determined than Tammy in her struggle, had insinuated itself into the lymph nodes along her trachea and she had died just a year after this photograph was taken – at the young age of thirty-two. Twenty years ago. She’d been gone longer, now, than they’d been married.

  Anderson had never remarried, and they had never had children.

  When he thought of the jobs that had come and gone, particularly when he’d been drinking, he reflected on the impermanence of anything he had ever produced. His first long-term job, five years working in a boot company – how many of those boots were likely to still exist now? Various positions in a printing company over a span of fifteen years, churning out business cards and stationery, all of that ephemeral paper probably reduced to dust and reabsorbed into the stuff of the universe. Other jobs, some lasting years but others mere months. And never had he helped create anything truly lasting. A bridge, a museum, let alone a painting to hang in a museum, something to outlive him. No, he didn’t even have a child to allow him the notion of a borrowed immortality.

  But even museums crumbled, he consoled himself. Every painting would degrade and return to a state of disorganized matter, too, eventually. Before that happened, their artists would be forgotten by all but dust-sniffing scholars.

  It was natural. It was the way of things. Anderson was not a religious man. He didn’t believe he would rejoin Tammy one day, except in the sense that they would both be part of the eternal stew of atoms, ever in flux, ever in the process of construction and destruction.

  He had no idea what he was trying to say to himself, with all this muddle. He thought: I’m in a state of self-destruction. He smiled at that, sadly, and looked away from his perpetually young wife’s face to click on the icon for his web browser.

  A window opened, filled the screen. It was entirely white, as Anderson’s home page waited to load. It was taking a bit too long.

  And then, the flat screen of the LCD monitor was filled with static. Furthermore, he had left his volume turned to 75 the last time he’d used the computer, probably after listening to a poor copy of an old music video on YouTube. So the sound of the static was a roar, and he was startled, fumbled with his mouse to lower the volume to 0. He Xed the window, banishing the static. Back to the placid photo, his wife’s gentle smile.

  He opened the browser again. Waited again. Static again.

  He typed in different web addresses. Google. YouTube. Hotmail. Every time: only static.

  “Static on a fucking computer?” he exclaimed out loud. He’d never seen it...never heard of such a thing. His fatalistic numbness had turned to rage at last. He ranted, “All right...what the hell’s going on?”

  The droning noise of TV snow exasperated him, and he whirled at the machine vengefully and shut it off altogether.

  Yet the whispery background noise continued. More subdued, but it was still there. At first he thought he might not have turned his computer volume down all the way, but then Anderson realized the truth. The sound was coming from outside his apartment.

  There were two small windows in the living room, on level with the ground outside, decorative hedges partially obscuring their view. Two small windows in the bedroom, too, all four looking out on the driveway that led to the apartment building’s parking lot, around back. On the other side of the driveway was a Knights of Columbus hall, which on every Wednesday night held a bingo game – its yellow windows filled with white-haired heads – and on most Friday nights, rented for parties, boomed annoyingly with either Indian or Brazilian music.

  He went to one of the twin living room windows now and pulled the cord to raise the blinds. Then, he took hold of the bottom of the window frame and pushed it upwards, after which he put his face close to the screen, expecting to smell the crisp cool air of an October night.

  The air had no smell, but with the window raised the hissing had grown louder, almost as loud as the roar of static had been through his computer speakers. Yet even gazing out into the night, he couldn’t tell what was causing the sound, because it was utterly black out there. Normally, however much those hedges might obstruct his view, he’d be seeing streetlights along this tree-lined side street, the floating windows of neighboring houses, even a faint ambient glow rising from the town all around him.

  “Power failure,” he said to himself, his voice sounding too close, as if the screen trapped it. Yes, it had to be a power failure. It hadn’t reached as far as his apartment building, thank God, but had still affected his TV, phone, computer. His services hadn’t been shut off, necessarily, after all – thank God. So what had caused the failure? Considering the interference with his devices, he wondered if it had been a solar flare, but then dismissed that as farfetched. Probably something as prosaic as a car hitting a pole. Or while he slept, had there been an unseasonal lightning storm, bringing down a power line? He hadn’t listened to the news today. Being laid off, he lived in a kind of insulated world, sometimes not venturing outside for days at a time, sometimes close to a week. The weather had almost become an irrelevancy. The outside world, full of busy workers and married couples, an abstraction.

  Since his eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness – it was so inky he couldn’t even make out the hedges, so close to
his screen – he focused on listening to the hissing sound instead. What was that? Static from all the TVs in the other thirty-plus apartments in this cheap little building with its faux brick facade? No, he thought, it must be the stirring of a strong breeze, wind blowing the leaves of trees. Sure, a windstorm could have brought down a power line. During Hurricane Irene, last year, he’d lost power for a day and a half.

  Or maybe the hissing was rain. The sibilant noise also sounded like a crackling fire. Or the blown sands of a desert storm. Any or all of the four elements.

  Voices behind him caused Anderson to whirl around. Gooseflesh spread down his arms; he had mistakenly believed the voices were coming from his computer speakers, but they were in Spanish, and passing through the hallway on the other side of his flimsy, dung-brown kitchen door.

  He crept to the door quietly, not wanting to give himself away as he pressed an eye to the tiny peephole lens.

  There had apparently been a string of people chattering past, maybe a family, headed in the direction of the building’s front door. (There was another entrance at the other end of the corridor, opening onto the parking lot.) Anderson caught a fleeting, distorted glimpse of a young girl – late teens or early twenties – he saw from time-to-time, though he didn’t know which apartment she lived in or even on which of the building’s three floors. He always noticed her, however, because she had a pretty face and a very short, curvy body with a protuberant bottom, typically outlined by tight black jeans. He took her to be Mexican, or from somewhere in Central America, like most of the tenants in this building. When he’d first moved here, going on three years ago, he’d been wary of these tenants, particularly the men, but none of them had ever seemed threatening or impolite, even behind his back. Quite the opposite: even the most thuggish-looking teenage boys were quick to hold the door for him if he were carrying groceries, and he had occasionally chatted with a couple of the older women, who seemed to enjoy testing him on what he remembered of his high school Spanish lessons, once he’d admitted to them that he had studied their language for two years.

  He held no illusions about inspiring this young woman – any young woman, any woman of any age – to fall in love with him, at this stage in his life, but that didn’t mean his libido had expired. He felt like the proverbial young man trapped inside an aging man’s body. At nineteen, working in that boot company, he had been befriended by an Armenian man in his forties. That man, nicknamed Johnny, has once confessed to Anderson that the years had flashed by like a comet. He was still young inside, he protested...as if a cruel trick had been played on him. Anderson had never forgotten those words. Now he was living them.

  He figured those people who had passed his door were going to check out what was happening...were going to look out the front door. He was tempted to unlock and open his door, step out into the corridor and join them, but a shyness prevented him. He withdrew from the peephole. Anyway, in case the apparent power outage did spread to their building, he should make preparations.

  Anderson drew a kitchen chair over to his refrigerator, stood on the chair to reach a set of cabinets above the fridge, dug out two large candles, a lighter, a flashlight. His “apocalypse stash,” he had joked to himself when he’d put these meager supplies aside after the Hurricane Irene experience.

  Next he went to his bathroom and started filling his tub with water, in case he did lose power and needed to scoop water into his toilet in order to flush it.

  A little excitement didn’t really hurt, did it? He almost welcomed this event, whatever its cause. Anything to break up life’s monotony.

  ***

  Anderson was frying two steaks for himself – wanting to use up whatever he had in his fridge before a power loss descended, rather than have to throw food away later – when peripherally he thought he saw a face surface through the shifting pool of interference framed in his computer monitor. He snapped his attention in that direction.

  He had shut off his TV, but not his computer, though its volume had remained muted. After some more attempts to go online, he had left a window open. A feed of restless nothingness. As he stared directly at the monitor now, he saw nothing changed. For all its crackling and popping activity, it was as inactive as a gravestone slate blown up to the highest magnification, its molecules electrified yet bound.

  Just his imagination, he decided, superimposing structure on chaos. Meaning on the meaningless.

  And then he heard a woman scream.

  It was out in the hallway. It had made Anderson jump. This time he rushed to his kitchen door and flung it open before he could consider that he might be exposing himself to some danger...or at the very least, to a problem that had nothing to do with him. But the wild, panicky crying that followed the initial cry drew him into the hallway and toward its source: the vestibule of the apartment building’s front entrance.

  On either side of him, the hallway’s walls were plastered with broad trowel strokes, giving them the look of being covered in dirty cake frosting. A number of brown doors interrupted the hall throughout its length. They tended to seal certain odors in the spaces between them. One section might smell enticingly of hamburger cooking for some Mexican dish or other. Another section might smell of incense. This one stank of trapped cigarette smoke, even though smoking was supposed to be against the rules for tenants. At least it beat the chemical fumes that wafted down from the apartment upstairs sometimes. Another tenant had confided to Anderson he believed the young couple up there had a meth lab going.

  Anderson pushed through the door before the short set of steps that took one up to ground level and the front vestibule. This was like a little airlock, a cramped telephone-booth space between two glass doors. Within it, on either side, were the apartments’ tiny mailboxes. And standing in this tight space, her hands pressed to the glass of the outermost door like suction cups, was one of the female tenants who had tested Anderson on his Spanish. She was still sobbing, staring out into the night.

  “Hey,” he asked her, “are you okay?”

  The short, stocky woman whipped around to face him. Her eyes were ballooned with frenzy, and she started babbling in Spanish, pointing through the glass. “Mi marido desaparecido!”

  “Slow down,” Anderson told her, “I don’t understand you...uh, no lo entiendo.”

  The woman took hold of Anderson’s forearm, still pointing behind her at the outer glass door. “My friends...my friends from Apartment 18, upstairs, they went outside to see what was going on. They told my husband they were going to go look...”

  “Yes?” Anderson prompted her. Had that been the family he had heard passing his door? That attractive young girl amongst them?

  After drawing in a shuddery gulp of air, the woman continued, “They didn’t come back...we checked. We knocked and knocked on their door. They left it unlocked, so we went in and no one was there. So my husband, Enrique, Enrique said let’s go outside and see if they’re out there.” The woman glanced over her shoulder at the door. Her bright but transparent reflection was superimposed over the darkness. “When I saw it was so black out there, I told Enrique don’t go. It didn’t look right...I was afraid...”

  Anderson looked through her reflection. So he wasn’t the only one who had thought it just looked too dark out there. Unnaturally dark. Even, perhaps, for a power loss.

  “Enrique opened the door.” Her sobbing was growing breathless, her words harder to get out. Her fingers crushed Anderson’s arm. “I told him don’t step outside...I told him! But...but...”

  “But what? What happened?”

  She looked up into Anderson’s eyes beseechingly. “He stepped into the black and he was gone! In one second...just gone! I couldn’t see him! I couldn’t...I couldn’t hear him! Only that sound.”

  “Look,” Anderson told her soothingly, “there’s been a power outage. It’s just really dark out there.” Somehow he didn’t sound convincing even to himself. What they were both feeling...about the unnaturalness of the darkness...it w
as an instinctual, intuitive reaction.

  “No...no!” she insisted, hysterical. “It’s like the black just swallowed him!”

  Then, something beyond the woman caught Anderson’s attention, and he said more to himself than to her: “Hey.”

  The woman turned to follow his gaze. When she saw that thin black wisps, like inky tendrils of smoke, were flowing around the edges of the door, she shrieked.

  Was it smoke? Was there a fire nearby, and the smoke was so thick out there it obscured all vision? But why then wouldn’t they be smelling it? And somehow these wisps – though pitch black – suggested to Anderson a grainy, gritty, and restless quality...as if the snaking tendrils were composed of millions of tiny seething particles. Like the swarming flecks of static on his computer screen.

  The lights went out in the hallway.

  The woman’s wailing was ear-piercing. She clawed at Anderson irrationally, and he ducked his face away from her. Still, her nails raked his neck. And then she seemed to fall at his feet. Anderson reached down for her, and for a second his fingers brushed against her back, but then she didn’t seem to be there anymore.

  Her screams were abruptly cut off. The hallway became silent...except for the muffled hiss beyond the glass door.

  Anderson spun away, blundered in the direction of his apartment, so unseeing that his eyes might have been burnt out of his skull. His left hand felt ahead of him along the wall, with its rough plastered texture. He struck one of the hallway’s interspersed doors, shoved it away from him, and now felt at the wall on the left-hand side. Desperately, clawing like the woman had clawed at him. He resisted looking over his shoulder. It would be pointless. His right hand finally closed on a doorknob. What if he had the wrong apartment, and the door was locked? But it turned in his hand, he slipped inside, slammed the door shut and locked it.

  The smoke had got around the edges of the glass door...the gap under his door was much wider. Still, with no other plan, Anderson felt his way across his lightless kitchen to where he always draped a bath towel over that little half partition between rooms, to dry his hands on when he worked at the sink. Groping wildly, he found the towel, turned back in the direction of the door (he hoped) and got down on hands and knees. He felt for the door, found it, pressed the towel against that empty wedge at its bottom. The act offered scant relief, but again, at the moment it was better than nothing.