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.
Bonnie said something from the kitchen, but I never heard what it was because the picture window blew in. Dozens of tentacles—I’ll call them that—exploded into the room in a shower of glass, looping and twisting and thrashing like downed high-tension lines jumping with deadly electricity. It happened quickly, with lethal speed. If anything, it was like watching a time-lapse of a tree growing roots at hyperspeed—the tentacles seemed to grow into the room until it was filled with them. They were bigger around than my thigh where they fed out of the darkness, tapering to needle-thin points. They were wild and destructive, upending the sofa and tossing the rocking chair through the air. Two of them smashed the coffee table with their weight and others shattered the wide-screen TV and tore ceiling tiles free. The wiry tips of them were like razors. They slit open the sofa and cut deep grooves in the walls.
Billy and I scrambled away and one of them, as if hearing us, came after us like a gigantic python. Its tip slashed at me, missed, and sliced a lampshade cleanly in two. We made it into the kitchen and I kicked the door shut just as the tentacles hit the other side like rustling, writhing vines in a windstorm. They beat against it and I could hear their sharp tips gouging into the wood. Whap! Whap! Whap! Without even having to ask, Billy grabbed one end of the kitchen table and I grabbed the other, wedging it up against the door.
“What’s going on?” Bonnie demanded. “What in the hell is going on?”
“Shut up!” Billy snapped at her, pulling the flashlight from her hand with such force I thought he had yanked her arm out of its socket.
The tentacles were still beating against the door, sliding against it with a smooth slithering sort of sound. I could see the blinding blue light coming under it and seeping around the edges. The doorknob jiggled again and again. Whether that was from the tentacles brushing against it or one of them investigating it, I didn’t know, but I had this crazy image in my head of the creature attempting to turn the knob and let itself in. The jiggling was rather gentle, insistent but gentle…then there was a loud cracking and the knob and its housing was ripped free from the other side.
Bonnie, who was crouched there on the floor by the stove holding Iris, who looked stricken mad, said, “Billy…do something! For godsake, do something!”
Billy looked from his wife to me with utter helplessness. His mouth kept opening and closing like he wanted to say something but nothing came out. He looked like a salmon gasping for air.
Iris crouched there with Bonnie, her eyes bulging from her wrinkled, sallow face like Ping-Pong balls. There was a visible tremor beneath her skin and she kept smacking her lips like she was trying to moisten them. The loose jowls beneath her chin seemed to vibrate. “All of us, one by one, are going to get taken away,” she said. “That’s the way it is and that’s the way they planned it. We can’t hide. They’ll find us. They’ll find us all.”
“Fuck that noise,” Billy said.
He grabbed the only weapon he saw: a broom. He picked it up and held it before him like a lance. The gaping hole in the door where the knob had been suddenly filled with worming motion as one of the tentacles slipped through. About three feet of it entered the room, the tip of it swaying from side to side as if it couldn’t make up its mind what to do. But if it couldn’t, Billy had no such constraints. Before I could stop him, he jumped forward and cracked the tentacle with the broom handle with a solid dull thump. He hit it again and again and it had the same effect as beating a rubber hose with a baseball bat. He knocked it around but it did not retreat.
It just waited there.
We waited with it.
After about five seconds of that and five seconds of Billy smacking it around, I said, “Stop it, Billy. Just leave it alone.”
He hesitated for a second and the tentacle—slick and black and oily—began to pulsate. The tapering sharp tip of it expanded, swelling like a snake that had just swallowed a mouse, becoming bulbous and blunt. Then it opened like a spout and squirted a string of goo at the broom handle. A copious amount of it enveloped the end. Billy still held on to it. The tentacle just waited there, the sticky rope of goo connecting it to the broom end. Then the goo moved. With a slimy, gushing sort of sound it slid down the broom handle towards Billy’s hands. It acted like it was alive and I was reminded of that scene in The Blob where the old man pokes the meteorite with a stick and it cracks open, the alien jelly sliding up the stick and engulfing his hand.
Billy let go of it before something like that happened and the tentacle sucked in the string of goo like a kid with a ribbon of snot, taking the broom with it. Both disappeared out through the hole in the door. For another minute or so we could hear the other tentacles rooting about in the living room and then silence. The blue glow winked out. By that time, Billy and I were huddled with Bonnie and Iris by the stove.
Ten minutes later, the thing was still gone.
“Must have needed a broom real bad,” Iris said and Bonnie broke into hysterical giggling that was about as close to the sound of full mental collapse as anything I’d ever heard.
And the night was still young.
13
About an hour later we heard the horn. It sounded in the night, shrill and insistent. One long beep, followed by two shorter ones. At first, I thought it was the things out there making some kind of weird noise, but it was just a car horn. Five minutes later, it repeated the long beep followed by the two short ones. I don’t think any of us thought it was accidental by that point.
“It’s a signal,” Bonnie said. “Somebody’s trying to signal us.”
“Yes,” I said, because it could be nothing else.
We said no more about it. I had a cigarette with Bonnie, and Billy sorted through the refrigerator until he found a longneck Bud. He sucked it down in one long pull, wiping foam from his mouth.