John Saul - Black Lightning

A dark house, totally empty.

But when he got there, the house was not dark at all. Lights glowed in two of the downstairs rooms and one of the upstairs ones.

The man lingered on the sidewalk across the street, watching. And then, at exactly ten, one of the downstairs lights went off, as did the upstairs one, and another light upstairs came on. All at the same instant.

The man smiled. Either three people inside all had thrown light switches at exactly the same moment, or the lights were on a timer.

Walking quickly over to Volunteer Park, the man found a pay phone by the conservatory. He dialed Joyce Cottrell’s phone number one final time.

As before, the phone rang on and on but no one picked it up.

Joyce Cottrell lived alone.

Returning to the empty house, he began looking for a way to get inside.

Within less than a minute he’d found it.

Joyce Cottrell had never moved the extra key from the hiding place where her mother had always left it, under the mat on the back porch. Just like his own mother and hundreds of thousands of others.

The man liked Joyce Cottrell’s house. It was much bigger than any house he’d ever been in before — big enough that his entire apartment could have been put into just its living room — though it wasn’t at all what he’d expected it to be. Shawnelle Davis’s apartment had looked just as he would have imagined a whore’s place to look — the furniture had been as cheap-looking as Shawnelle herself. But Joyce Cottrell had nice furniture, and everything looked clean and fresh, like it was brand-new.

The man prowled slowly through the house, looking at everything, touching only one thing. Then, as it grew close to the time when Joyce Cottrell would come home from work, he slipped into the master bedroom.

As he waited in her closet for Joyce to come up to her room, his nose was filled with the scent of sachet. The lavender sweetness instantly triggered a memory from when he was a little boy.

His mother’s closet had smelled like this.

He inhaled deeply, immediately transported back to a day long ago when he had gone into his mother’s closet to play dress-up in her shoes, doing his best to balance on her high heels.

She had caught him.

Caught him, and spanked him, even though he’d been very careful not to touch any of her clothes or hurt the shoes.

He’d been forbidden ever to go into his mother’s room again, closed out of her bedroom as coldly as he’d been closed out of the rest of his mother’s world.

Now, as the man listened to Joyce Cottrell’s footsteps coming up to the second floor, his temples throbbed with rage.

Pressing his eye to the crack in the door he had left slightly ajar, he watched Joyce undress, his anger growing with each passing second.

The fingers of one hand clutched the knife the man had brought up from the kitchen; his other hand unconsciously stroked the hardness that had grown between his legs.

By the time Joyce Cottrell had stripped down to her underwear and moved to the closet to hang up her dress, the man was ready.

Today, Joyce Cottrell had seen a naked man in the backyard next door.

Tonight, she found a fully clothed one waiting in her closet.

The one in the backyard next door had been holding a broken shaver.

The one in her closet was grasping a knife. But all Joyce saw as she pulled her closet door open was a glint of light reflecting off the long blade that hovered above her, and a pair of eyes, flashing with the pent-up fury the man had been suppressing so long.

“Love me!” he commanded as the knife slashed down to plunge deep into Joyce Cottrell’s breast. “Just love me!”

Joyce Cottrell died before the man’s words registered in her mind, collapsing to the bedroom floor like a sagging balloon.

Now, fully caught up in his fantasy, seeing his mother’s face instead of Joyce’s, the man set to work. Laying open Joyce Cottrell’s chest, tearing at her heart, his rage poured forth. He talked as he worked, saying all the things to Joyce Cottrell that he had never been able to say to his mother.

Finally, the hardness between his legs no longer to be denied, the man pulled down his pants and mounted Joyce Cottrell’s body, barely able to keep from screaming out in ecstasy as for the first time in his life he experienced sexual release.

The Experimenter’s eyes bored into the darkness.

The night was silent, yet something had awakened him. Even during the times when most men wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all, the Experimenter had always been able to close his eyes to the world beyond his own mind, to retreat within himself to rest undisturbed.

But tonight some outside force — a force over which he had no control — had roused him. With the silence of a phantom, he explored the upper floor, but all he could hear was the slow, steady breathing of the family who lay in their beds, sleeping in peace, blissfully unaware of his presence. At the top of the stairs he paused, not out of any sense of indecision, but to collect data with his acutely honed senses.

Whatever had awakened him was not in the house, for other than the normal creaks and groans of an ancient structure shifting uncomfortably in the night, all was quiet. Satisfied that whatever had roused him from his rest was beyond the protecting walls, he moved down the stairs and through the rooms of the lower floor, gazing out the windows into the comparative light of the urban night, searching for.… something. If he saw it — even sensed it — he would recognize it at once. But all was quiet beyond the windows; nothing moved; he felt no hidden presence lurking in the shadows.

Yet something had awakened him. He would not rest until he had identified that which had intruded into his sleep.

He moved into the kitchen, then out onto the back porch. The night air was cool against his skin, and unbidden memories of other times when he’d stood naked in the cool of the night flooded into his mind.

Nights when, his experiment finished but the ruined remains of his subject still to be disposed of, he’d stepped out of his laboratory into the refreshing cool of the night, sometimes to vent his frustration at failure in a howl of rage; sometimes simply to wash himself in the river even before beginning the tedious — but very necessary — clean-up process.

Sometimes, though, he’d simply stood naked beneath the eternity of stars sparkling above him, feeling like a newborn child of the universe, his skin glittering darkly with a glowing sheen of blood released only moments earlier from the heart of his latest subject. On those nights he would suck hungrily at the cold night air as if by inhaling deeply enough he might somehow take in enough of the life-sustaining oxygen to support not only himself, but also the ruined body that still lay inside the motor home. But even as he filled his lungs, he’d always known that oxygen was not enough. Without the spark, without the black, invisible lightning that emanated from somewhere deep within the body itself, no amount of air put back into his subject’s lungs could restore its body to life. That was when despair always overcame him, when the cool of the night air that had felt like the caress of a lover only a moment earlier became a dark cloak concealing an unseen enemy.

Tonight, though, the darkness was neither lover nor enemy. Tonight it was an enigma, bearing within its folds something that he needed to discover.

He stood still, waiting.

He felt the night, all his senses reaching out, searching for some clue as to exactly what had awakened him. Then, out of the steady drone of insects, frogs and traffic, a new sound emerged.

A latch clicking.

Hinges creaking.

Another latch opening.