With a soft, pattering sound, several large drops of blood fell down from above and splattered on the pages of her magazine.
Not realizing what it was at first, Debbie frowned and touched the red drops with her fingertips. “Where’s this coming from?” she wondered aloud. Then she looked up and saw Andy’s mangled body draped over the rafters like a slab of beef hung up in a smokehouse.
She opened her mouth to scream, but before she could utter a sound, Jason’s hand came out from underneath the hammock and clamped down across her forehead. He held her head down while his other hand drove a carving knife up between the rope strands of the hammock and into the back of her neck. The long, sharp blade ripped through her trachea and vocal cords as she croaked horribly, choking on the blood that flooded her severed throat. The steel blade went completely through her neck and, in the last agonizing seconds of her life, Debbie saw the reddened tip of the carving knife rising up out of the hollow of her throat like some grotesque growth erupting from her body. Through a haze of red fire, she saw Andy’s body up above her in the rafters, one arm dangling down, as if her were trying to reach out to her, and then all feeling went away as she slipped into oblivion.
Chuck staggered back into the kitchen and started pawing through the pots and pans with a tremendous clatter. He giggled as he throught to himself, Man, am I wrecked! He selected a huge pot and poured a generous amount of corn oil into it, straight from the bottle, without bothering to measure. Then he turned the flame up all the way and tossed a couple of test kernels into the pot, just as the instructions on the jar said. Then he decided, the hell with it, and dumped a whole handful of popcorn kernels into the pot. He stared at it thoughtfully for a moment, then dumped in another handful just for good measure. Then he upended the jar over the pot and dumped it all in.
He rummaged through the shelves, knocking over spice tins and containers of dried herbs, looking for some salt. He found something labeled “sea salt” and figured that was close enough. He shook a mess of it out into the pot, and for variety’s sake, he added some pepper and some MSG. He shook the pot and after a few minutes, the popcorn started to pop. When he lifted the lid to check, popcorn exploded up into the air like sparks. He leaned in with his mouth open, trying to catch them on the fly.
Chili came rushing into the kitchen. “Did I hear you screaming?” she said, looking at him anxiously.
He grinned at her, his mouth crammed full of popcorn. The MSG actually helped the flavor. “It’s probably Debbie having an orgasm,” he said with his mouth full, replacing the lid of the pot. He frowned. “How come you don’t scream when we have sex?”
“Give me something to scream about,” she said wryly.
All the lights went out.
Chili screamed.
“What’s the matter?” Chuck said, frightened.
“Nothin’. I was just practicing.”
“Well, don’t do that to me!” he said, taking a deep breath to calm himself. The only light in the kitchen was the blue flame from the stove. Chuck quickly removed the pot from the flame before all the popcorn burned. He heard Chili rummaging through the kitchen drawers, and a moment later, she clicked on a flashlight and handed it to him.
“Here,” she said, “go down in the cellar and check the fuse box.”
“In the dark?” he said. “Alone?”
Ever since childhood, he’d had an irrational fear of the dark that, unlike other children, he had never managed to outgrow. When he slept alone, he still slept with a nightlight. In the darkness, coats hanging in open closets took on the ominous aspect of strangers lurking in the shadows, waiting to leap out and attack him. A bathrobe hanging on a hook screwed into the back of a door looked like some sinister ogre reaching out for him. Furniture took on soft, indefinite shapes in the darkness, which his imagination transformed into ravening monsters crouching and ready to spring. He knew, of course, that there were no strangers hiding in the closet, only coats, and that there was no ogre standing by the door, but just his bathrobe on a hanger, and that it wasn’t a werewolf crouching in the corner, but merely an armchair. Intellectually, he knew that, but emotionally, he was convinced that strange, malevolent beings crept out of the woodwork when the lights where out.
“Be a man, man,” Chili said, taking a lantern down from a windowsill and setting it on the table to prime and light it. Chuck sighed with resignation and headed for the basement stairs.
He opened the door and shined the light down the steep steps. He wrinkled his nose as he smelled the damp, musty odor coming up from the basement. Slowly, he tiptoed down the steps, talking to himself as he went.
“There’s nothin’ to be afraid of, man,” he said, moistening his lips as he carefully picked hs way down the stairs. “So what if it’s dark? Nothin’ to be afraid of.”
He got down to the bottom of the stairs and his bare feet stepped into water puddled on the cellar floor. Great, he thought, the damn cellar’s flooded. The water came up to his ankles. He swallowed hard and tried not to think about all the things that could be swimming around in that dirty water, rats, snakes, leeches, leeches? In a cellar? Come on, man, he thought, get it together. Don’t go
