Blackout

3

I was in panic mode and I really didn’t know why.

There could have been any number of logical explanations. She was in the bathroom. She was in the kitchen or dining room downstairs—I hadn’t checked the windows in either—or when I came upstairs, she was down in the basement closing windows. All perfectly reasonable scenarios. Only, I wasn’t buying any of them. I had the worst sort of warning signals coming up from the pit of my being and I couldn’t deny the message they were sending. I wasn’t a panicky sort, but you wouldn’t have known it at that moment.

I climbed out of bed…no, I jumped out of bed. I went over near the door and bumped into the dresser, fumbling for the light switch. I clicked it on. I don’t know what I expected to see. The room was empty. I could see where Kathy had slept, the covers thrown back, but that was all. There was nothing else…yet, I kept staring as if there was some clue I was missing.

There wasn’t.

I went back downstairs, turning on lights as I went. That bugged the hell out of Kathy. She was very frugal by nature and the idea of me wasting electricity unnecessarily drove her nuts. Why is it you leave a trail of lights in your wake wherever you go? she’d say. The memory made me smile but it didn’t last long. I was turning on lights now not because I was a lazy, irresponsible slob or to bug her, but because I was very uneasy. I’m not going to say I was scared at that point, but it was coming. Oh yes.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, clicking on the living room and hall lights, I called out, “Kathy? Kathy? Dammit, girl, where the heck are you?”

Although my imagination was more than a little overheated and I was conjuring up images of any number of horrors that might have befallen my wife, my own common sense was overruling these things in favor of much more prosaic but no less horrible possibilities: Kathy had hit her head, she’d had a stroke, a heart attack, an embolism had blown in her head. The latter had happened to my cousin Shelli the day after she turned thirty so it was always in the back of my mind.

I called Kathy’s name a few more times and then I went down the basement steps, turning on more lights. “Kath?” I called out. “You down here?” I got no answer and I knew she wasn’t there, but I wouldn’t rest until I checked every inch of the place just in case she was on the floor. I had no real reason to fear that she had had a stroke or a heart attack or something. She was thin like her whole family, unlike mine, which was prone to fat. She walked like three miles every day and ate healthy. Still…shit happens. My aunt Eileen dropped dead from a heart attack when she was a month shy of her fortieth birthday. She ran two miles every day, hit the gym four times a week, and maintained a very strict low-fat diet. It happens. My uncle Rich had so far outlived her by twenty years, a guy with a round sack of a belly who smoked two packs a day, killed a six-pack every night, and went through more red meat in a day than most did in a week. Guys like him confuse the hell out of the AMA, but sometimes it’s just heredity. You’ll live a long life if you’re supposed to live a long life. If people die young in your family, you probably will, too.

Anyway, that’s the kind of crap that was going through my head as I looked for Kathy. She wasn’t in the basement so I climbed back up the stairs and checked the dining room. And it was as I did so that I heard a banging sound that had nothing to do with the storm.

It was coming from the kitchen.

As soon as I got in there, I smelled the rain. Which wasn’t too surprising because the back door was wide open, the screen door caught in the wind and slamming against the outside wall. The little pneumatic closer was torn free of its bracket. I turned on the light, just standing there trying to make sense of things. I could understand the screen door getting yanked open by the wind, but not the inside door. No, it was open because somebody had left it open. Kathy must have come in here last to shut the windows and then she had gone outside.

I stood in the doorway, rain pelting my face, and called her name.

There was no reply and I can’t say that I would have heard one anyway with the racket of the storm. The lightning flashed and I had to squint against its brilliance as the wind tried to pull me out into the night. I knew I was going to have to go out there. I got a flashlight from the junk drawer and threw on a coat and some work boots.

I had just gotten to the door when I saw something move.

I caught it out of the corner of my eye—something serpentine and glistening. It moved quickly, snaking away into the bushes. I hadn’t seen it very well in the dark, but it sure as hell had looked like a very big snake. I froze there in the doorway. We don’t have big snakes in town. Out in the country, you might see a large rat snake or two from time to time, but not in town. Never anything more than a garter snake in a vacant lot. And what I had seen was no garter snake…I only caught a glimpse of it, but whatever it was, it was bigger around than my arm and black, oily black.

I was sure I had seen it.

But as I stood there, panning about with the flashlight, there was nothing at all. I called out for Kathy a few more times, then went out into the storm, telling myself I had not just seen a huge snake.

Then the lights went out.