Fear: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror (6 page)

When they took comments from the audience, I raised my hand. “I was told that this has happened before.”

Members of the panel looked to one another, mystified by my comment. The mayor stood and scratched his head. “I don't know who told you that, son, but I've never heard of it.”

Sir Melvin stepped forward. “This settlement has only been terra-formed for the last five years. It's only in the last year that the planet has developed its own ozone layer and the tents have been removed, enabling
Gattus
to land safely.”

“Wasn't there a settlement here ten years ago?” I asked.

“Absolutely not. The planet was uninhabitable then.”

I knew he was lying. But why? Probably because he thought that real estate sales would plummet if he told the truth about what had happened. At least that was my guess.

“It is a punishment from God!”

All eyes turned to the short, white-haired man in the rumpled black suit. I recognized him from TV and magazines. He was the astronomer Schroeder Peterson. Had it been anyone less highly esteemed, he would have been jeered off the floor. But, since he was the most renowned astronomer in the world, his startling words were met with hushed anticipation.

“A strange light has suddenly and unexpectedly appeared in the sky above Lectus,” he explained. “It does not seem to be a star or sun. Possibly it is an alien spacecraft of such immensity we cannot begin to fathom its size. My own belief is that we are being visited by God.”

“Why would you think it is God?” Sir Melvin asked respectfully.

“It is just my feeling,” Schroeder Peterson replied.

 

 

That night we returned home and found Mom and Felicia in Chomper and Chester's room. My brothers were still feeling too sick to get out of bed.

Felicia had stayed at her friend's house that night. When the strange gas came, they had all gone down into their basement, where there were no windows, and hadn't become as overcome with the fumes as most of the other families around us. It was her good luck to have been visiting there at the time.

Dad and I told Mom and Felicia how, by the end of the meeting, Schroeder Peterson had convinced the group that the key to discovering what had happened lay in contacting the light. “They wanted a volunteer to go out in a space module and see if he or she can contact this strange light,” Dad told Mom. “No one volunteered. And then someone recognized me and wanted me to go. I guess because I always play the hero part they figured I really am one.”

“I hope you said no,” Mom told him.

“Of course I did. I sure wasn't going to go and leave you here alone with the kids.”

I was actually a little embarrassed by the way Dad had told them that he absolutely wouldn't go. I could tell the others were disappointed that he wasn't living up to his big-screen image.

Dad continued telling about the light and was in mid-sentence when a deafening roar suddenly split our ears.

The window smashed open, spraying glass everywhere.

I clutched the bedpost with one hand and Chester with the other. A force was pulling us toward the window.

Felicia shrieked as she rose in the air. In an instant she was sucked backward out the window, bumping her head as she went.

Then Chomper began to float upward, flailing his arms and screaming.

Horrified, Mom and Dad reached out to him. Dad, holding on to the bedpost, caught Chomper's ankle. Mom grabbed Dad around the waist and took hold of Chomper's other leg.

I held tight to Chester as a powerful sucking force lifted me, too. It was as if I was hovering on a current of hot air.

Then came a whine so high-pitched I felt as though my head would shatter. Chester was sucked out of my arms just before I dropped abruptly to the floor.

The last sound I heard was my head banging as it hit.

 

 

When I awoke hours later, it was pitch-dark. “Dad?” I whispered as I slowly sat up. “Mom?”

It was eerily quiet. An awful terror gripped me. Had my entire family really just been sucked out the window?

The pain in my head was horrible, but I forced myself to stand and turn on a light.

What I saw made me shake.

The room was completely empty except for one bed that lay on its side. Hurrying to the window, I looked to see if any of them had been dropped to the ground, but no one was there.

I ran outside and thrashed the bushes, calling Mom and Dad, searching for my sister and brothers.

“Phil?”

It was Dad, bleeding and badly scraped, but alive. He pulled me into an emotional hug. “Thank God you're okay,” he said. “Where is everyone else?”

“I can't find them,” I told him, my voice catching.

 

 

Dad and I searched for hours. We joined a crowd of people also looking for their families who had been swept up by the hot wind. Occasionally, one of them would get lucky and find an injured loved one who had been swept into a tall tree or been blown to a rooftop. But Dad and I couldn't find a trace of Mom, Felicia, Chomper, or Chester.

“What do we do now?” I asked Dad, exhausted and fighting back tears.

“I'm volunteering to go to the light,” he said. “If that light has Mom and my kids, I want them back. If I have to finally be a hero for real, then that's what I'll be.”

I realized I was sweating. Dad was drenched with perspiration as well. And I was squinting because the sky had turned a vivid, nearly blinding yellow.

 

 

I had a front row seat for the launch of the space module being sent to the strange light. The eager, fascinated crowd gathered at the site wearing black sunglasses to protect them from the strong rays of the light.

Dad was already in the module. As he'd walked out to the pad in his heat-proof spacesuit, he'd looked every inch the hero he always played. I shook his hand and told him how proud I was of him. “Don't worry, Phil. I'll be back,” he'd said.

As we waited for the module to take off, a kind of giddiness was overtaking the crowd. It was almost as though they were getting drunk on the light pouring onto us. “I wish I was going, too,” an elderly man beside me said.

“Me too. Take me to the light!” a woman shouted, lifting her hands toward it.

“Take me! Take me!” screamed another woman, arms raised, swaying rapturously. Soon everyone was yearning to go toward the light.

A man in a suit tapped me on the shoulder. “Would you like to come into the control room and watch the takeoff on our closed-circuit monitor?” he offered. I thanked him and said I would.

I watched in the darkened room with a handful of technicians as the module took off. “Now we're going to closed-circuit inside the module,” a technician with red hair announced.

For a second, I saw Dad sitting at the helm of the cramped cockpit. Then, abruptly, the screen fuzzed before going blank. “We've lost visual,” the technician stated the obvious. “The immense heat must be sending solar flares.”

“Let's hope the heat panels hold,” said the man in the suit.

I sat with my stomach in knots as Dad's voice came into the room. I wished I could've seen him but at least I could hear him.

“I have left Lectus's atmosphere and am heading toward the mysterious light. My solar defense suit is equipped with an internal cooling device. I'm glad of that because already it's scorching up here,” he reported.

For several long minutes he was silent.

“As the module gets closer, the light is increasingly blinding. I am flipping the antiglare visor down over my helmet,” he said, finally.

“I am attempting to contact the light with a series of laser signals. . . . Nothing.”

More silence behind the hum of the speakers.

I wondered why he wasn't speaking.

“The light is just out there,” he said, and I noticed that his voice had lost its commanding strength.

“If it is, in fact, God, it is not responding,” he spoke again, his voice weaker still.

“I'm not sure what to do next. Even with this suit on, I'm sweating.”

I stood, alarmed. “Tell him to come back,” I said.

“Can't,” the technician said, “we've lost two-way. That light is affecting our communication signals.”

“He'll be okay,” said the man in the suit.

The next time Dad spoke, he sounded drunk, though I knew he couldn't be. “A strange feeling is taking hold of me—a certainty of what I have to do next,” he reported. “It's as if I have no choice anymore. I know this is crazy but I can't stop myself. I am going to the leave the module to go to the light.”

“No!” I shouted as a deafening crackle filled the control room.

 

 

It is now a year later and I am back on Earth living with my aunt and uncle. They have brought me to a special session of an investigative committee in Washington, D.C.

I sit, anxiously waiting as a senator takes to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen, this session of our committee is called to order. We have finally recovered the space module flown by John Biggs Boreidae. As you know, for some reason we have yet to understand, the heroic Mr. Boreidae chose to leave his spacecraft in a delusional attempt to go toward the light. However, we have recovered the badly charred module and discovered that its recorder caught these voices. What you are about to hear might be the voices of an alien race far more sophisticated than our own, or as the esteemed Dr. Peterson has suggested, it could, in fact, be the very voice of God.”

I sat forward, my fists clenched in anticipation. In the next minute, the module's recorder was played over the public-address system.

Female voice: “Damned fleas! I don't know how we got this infestation. The cat probably brought them in.

“Nothing gets rid of them! I've tried spraying insecticide. I'm sick of vacuuming. The only thing that works at all are these flea traps. They can't help but jump to the lightbulb and then they fall on the sticky paper below.

“It's weird to think that such tough little survivors have such a stupid streak. Who knows why they jump into the light? They just can't help themselves, I guess.”

▼ JENNIFER ALLISON ▼

 

 

 

 

 

T
he chances are pretty good that I'm going to be killed before daylight, and I can't help but think this never would have happened if we hadn't moved to Entrails, Michigan. I know there's no point in thinking this way, but really, there's nothing I can
do
but sit here and think. I've already panicked, banged on the bars of my cage, and searched for an escape. Now all I can do is consider how I got into this situation in the first place. Naturally, I find myself wishing I could rewind time—wishing I could go back and redo any of the events and choices that led me to the end of the road.

Did I mention I wouldn't be stuck here now if we hadn't moved? That part certainly wasn't
my
choice. My dad lost his job in Detroit and, when neither he nor my mother could find work in their fields, they got the bright idea to move to a small town in the country. My mother managed to find a teaching job but my father's plans were vague: some days he said he planned to start his own business; other days he said he planned to write a bestselling novel or become an organic farmer. At any rate, both of my parents were convinced that out here in Entrails we could live like kings for very little money, and they weren't about to take the advice of a fifteen-year-old girl who didn't want to move.

My parents bought a new house that was about five times the size of our old house in the Detroit suburbs. “And we got it for a song!” my father crowed. It was a foreclosed property; the previous owners had just stopped paying the bills and left town.

Our new house was enormous, but the house next to ours was even bigger—a mansion four stories tall with two towers that popped up from the roof, reminding me of turrets on a medieval castle.

“That house next door is an amazing example of Victorian architecture, Hannah,” my mom declared when we first arrived in our new neighborhood.

“Our family and the neighbors next door have the best houses in the whole town,” my dad added. “In this town, we're like royalty.”

That was the moment I first glimpsed something disturbing—something I did my best to ignore. In an upstairs window of the house next door, a shadowy figure parted the lace curtains and stared down at our car. I had the distinct sense that someone up there was looking at us—sizing us up. But I told myself I was just feeling anxious about being in a new place.

 

 

My parents and I went inside to check out the long hallways and empty rooms in our new house. I was trying to decide between two large bedrooms on the second floor when someone rang the doorbell.

I heard my mother open the door.

“Hello. I wanted to welcome you to our neighborhood.” It was a woman who spoke with a smooth, formal voice.

Curious, I stepped out of the second-floor bedroom and leaned over the hallway banister to listen more closely.

“My name is Rebecca Perfect,” the woman announced. “I live in the house next door.”

“Oh, nice to meet you!” In contrast, my mother's voice sounded nasal, high-pitched, and nervous. “Your house is just beautiful!”

From my perch, I saw my mom hurriedly tucking her frizzy hair behind her ears—something she does when she feels embarrassed or intimidated.