Tim Curran - Blackout

“Don’t, Ray,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. Wait for daylight at least.”

“I would, Jon, but having to occupy a house with these idiots is more than I can tolerate.” When Bonnie made a derisive snort, he turned and glared at her, which stopped the words from reaching her lips. Then he looked at all of us. “I’ve busted my ass for years trying to hold our elected officials responsible for the shitstorms they create. I was the first one to lead the charge and I was always on the front line fighting against graft and corruption. Nobody can deny that. I was involved. Goddammit, I was involved! Maybe I didn’t get elected, but I tried and I never gave up. But you know what? I give up now. All those years I did it because I wanted to represent the real people, the working-class people. What a waste of fucking time that was—”

“Ray, c’mon,” I said.

“—you people don’t deserve representation! You’re all goddamn idiots just like the politicians think! Fucking lambs to be led to slaughter! You deserve what you get! Each and every one of you deserve it because you’re all too fucking stupid to question your government! You won’t take the time to get off your cell phones or shut off your stupid reality shows or quit playing with your guns long enough to pay attention to the puppet masters who manipulate you! Fine and fucking dandy! You’re all going to get what you deserve now. And I couldn’t be goddamned happier.”

He started laughing, slowly making his way over to Bonnie, who was shaking now. She was scared and Billy, I think, was scared, too. Ray was on the verge of a breakdown or a psychotic episode. I don’t think even Billy would have wanted a piece of him.

“You people can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “That goes for you, too, Jon. You’re no goddamn better. Now…I’m going to walk out of this fucking house and I really hope one of you will try and stop me. I really do. I’m getting out of here and going back to my house and fuck the lot of you. If God is merciful, none of you fucking idiots will come out of this alive. I only hope you’re the first, Bonnie.”

With that he turned on his heel and went right up to the front door. He unlocked it and stepped out onto the porch. Down the steps he went with nothing but a little penlight in his hand, head held high and shoulders square.

“Well, I guess he told you,” Billy said to his wife.

Bonnie giggled.

“Foolish little man,” Iris said. “He’ll choke on his own hot air.”

I wasn’t really happy with any of them, Iris included. Yes, Ray was a pain in the ass, but everything he said was pretty much true. If everyone was involved in the political process, I suppose the good old U.S. really would have been a country by the people and for the people and not for the entitled and by the entitled. Well, anyway, that was my grand soapbox moment of the day.

Ray had gone about five steps from the porch when he stopped.

He cocked his head as if he were listening. Something out there had him either puzzled…or scared. I pushed in closer to the window so I could see what he was seeing and maybe to call him back. He stood there shining his little penlight around. Against the enclosing blackness, the beam was white as sugar, very bright. It cut through the darkness like a laser. It almost looked like he had a white sword in his hand. I noticed something then I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was the angle of the light or the reflection or refraction…but the darkness was not just the absence of illumination, it was something more. I could see it moving around Ray like a mist of coal dust. I saw it thicken and expand until he became a filmy shape.

And then I saw something move out there, something huge.

Ray made a sort of choking sound and maybe I did, too. Before I could so much as call to him to get back inside, that weird blue orb appeared, hovering about ten feet or so above him. It looked like a radiant platter, perfectly circular, a phosphorescent eye of blue-green-white light that was so intense I had to look away.

But Ray didn’t look away.

He stood there, frozen, staring up at it as if he were hypnotized. Maybe he was. That monstrous glowing eye had him and he wasn’t getting away. He didn’t even make an attempt to. The eye, or whatever it might have been, was set in the face of some massive black amorphous shape that moved ever closer to him. Then it took him. It happened very quickly. I saw a multitude of black whipping tendrils like the tentacles of a squid seem to explode out of the darkness. They were made of that same glossy black material as the cables. There were literally dozens of them in motion, undulating and coiling and reaching out with amazing speed. No squid or octopus in existence had that many arms. They took hold of Ray easily, winding him up, seeming to cocoon him.

He screamed.

We all heard him scream.

Iris fell back from her walker and I caught her. I heard her voice saying, “Dear God, dear God, dear God,” again and again. By then, Bonnie and Billy were there, seeing what we were seeing and struck speechless by it.

“Get her out of here,” I told Bonnie and she stumbled away, supporting Iris, taking her through the living room and into the kitchen. She did this blindly, without question.

Ray was a dead man and I knew it, but my mind kept racing in those few precious seconds after the tendrils grabbed him. It was looking for a plan of action, trying to come up with something, but there was nothing. There wasn’t a damn thing I or anyone else could have done. Billy and I stood there helplessly, both trembling, both breathing hard, both filled with a combination of terror, revulsion, and wonder.

We both saw what happened next.

Mere seconds after the thing seized Ray, he let out one last scream and the thing crushed him. There was a sound like a dog crunching through bone and Ray jerked and some fleshy white mass was forced from his mouth. I think it was his stomach. The creature moved off into the darkness and its orb blinked out and there was only that same impenetrable blackness out there pushing up against the window.

I just stood there shaking from head to toe.

Billy kept making a swallowing sound like he couldn’t get any good spit down his throat. “What the fuck?” he finally said and there was a sobbing quality to his voice. “What the fuck just happened?”

But I didn’t know and had I known, I doubted whether I could have unlocked my jaw long enough to tell him. I felt like I was carved from wood. My body was completely inflexible. The tone of Billy’s voice was confused and desperate and god-awful scared. It was the voice of a little boy who’d just seen his puppy get run down in the road. He was looking to me to tell him how such a thing could be, how it could have happened in a sane and ordered universe. He wanted me to make sense of it, to put it into some kind of logical perspective, but I couldn’t and my inability almost hurt me.

I got myself moving and I took Billy by the arm. “We better get the hell away from this window. It knows where we are and I don’t think it’s just going to go away.”

He looked at me. His eyes were wide, his mouth pulled into a crooked line, and his face was beaded with sweat. In the pale lantern light, he looked like one of those characters Johnny Craig used to draw for Vault of Horror : sweaty, staring, broken by fear, on the verge of some shocking truth or dark revelation that would twist his mind completely out of shape. He reached out a hand and touched me as if he was trying to confirm my reality.

“C’mon,” I said.

We had reached the couch when that luminous orb clicked back on just outside the living room window as if someone had flicked on a spotlight. It leered in at us like the eye of a cyclops, filling the room with cool blue light. Billy and I just stopped where we were like frogs captured in a strong flashlight beam. I think it was instinctive. If you freeze up, what’s after you won’t be able to find you. But in that situation, it wasn’t applicable. That thing out there knew where we were and I had a pretty good idea that we could have hid in a closet and it still would have seen us.