Blackout

5

“Hell is going on out here?”

I hadn’t been expecting it and I jumped back. It was Al Peckman. He was standing there with the door open. I was listening for the scream again because I had no doubt the voice was female and I was worried it might be Kathy.

“Jon? What’re you doing out here?” Al asked.

“I’m looking for Kathy,” I told him, quickly sketching what had happened. “Did you hear that scream?”

“I thought I heard something.”

Then it came again, shrieking and shrill and drawn-out before fading into the night. I couldn’t say it was Kathy; then again I couldn’t say it wasn’t. I started off after it and Al told me to wait. He threw on some shoes and we both jogged down the block. The scream came from the direction of the Andersens’ at the end. We stood there, Al and I, not speaking, just waiting for something, anything, but there was nothing except the nearly suffocating silence of the night.

“This is fucked up,” Al finally said. “Hell kind of storm was that anyway? I never seen anything like it.”

“Me either.”

We waited, but we didn’t hear anything else. The storm had completely passed now—even the lightning had stopped flashing. There was nothing but a tomblike silence up and down Piccamore Way that seemed to have crawled right under our skin. What bothered me most, among other things, was the darkness itself. It simply wasn’t right. There are dark nights, but this was beyond any of that. Far beyond it. There was no moonlight. The blackness around us was heavy and concealing and claustrophobic. We couldn’t see more than fifteen feet in any direction even with the flashlight. It was unnatural. The darkness was like a black mist that had settled around us in tarps and sheets.

Al lit a cigarette and the flame of his lighter was almost blinding.

“It’s not right,” I said.

“What isn’t?”

“This dark. It’s darker than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s like swimming in oil.”

Al pulled off his cigarette. “It gets real dark when the lights go out. People don’t realize how dark night is until the lights fail.”

“Sure.”

But it was more than that and I think we both knew it. I was worried sick about Kathy and I honestly didn’t know what to do. I played the light around in the night, picking out hedges and the Andersens’ porch but not much else. The inky blackness was weird and scary and I admitted the same to Al, who refused to discuss it. The flashlight beam seemed to fade after fifteen or twenty feet and it was almost like it was swallowed by the night.

I clicked it off.

The pitch darkness pressed in closer. I swear I could almost feel its weight against my skin. It was a palpable thing and that definitely made no sense whatsoever. This was not the gloom of an ordinary night, even a moonless or starless night, this was the absolute absence of light of any kind, the abyssal blackness of an ocean trench or the darkness that fills the void between galaxies.

“Jesus, Jon,” Al said, “turn that fucking thing back on.”

I did and he calmed somewhat.

He felt the same way I did about the dark, only he didn’t want to admit it and that was just fine. I wasn’t going to say any more about it. I figured that was probably best. Whoever had been doing the screaming had stopped and never started again. We searched around the Andersen house but we saw nothing amiss. Al knocked on the door, but there was no answer. And being as late as it was, we didn’t push it. Either they were sleeping or they had decided they weren’t going to answer any fool knocking in the middle of the night.

“What now?” Al said as we moved back out to the street.

“I don’t know.”

But I did know. Since the phones were out and the power was down, I would have to go for help. It was about a ten-minute ride to the police station downtown. It was the only thing I could think of doing. I needed help finding Kathy and I needed it right goddamn now. There was no time to waste.

“Listen,” I told Al. “I’m going to drive downtown and get the cops rolling on this. Can you go rouse some of the neighbors and get them out here with flashlights? Get them searching?”

“I sure as hell can try.”

It was the best we could do. We went down to Al’s house and the night was so unbelievably dark I knew that if my flashlight faded, we’d never find our way back. We’d be left groping like blind men. Al ducked inside to get his own flashlight while I went back to my house to look one last time for my wife. I went room to room, but she wasn’t there. Not in the yard, not in the garage. I couldn’t make sense of it. My scenarios of her having a heart attack or something and falling down were unpleasant, but at least they made some concrete sense. More sense than the idea of an adult woman stepping out the back door and vanishing into the fucking Twilight Zone.