“Covers,” she said.
Paul reached down for the comforter and dragged it up over them. He put his arm around Charlotte, caressing her breasts, and put his head deep into his pillow.
Within seconds, he was snoring.
He was dreaming, perhaps not surprisingly, about needing to go to the bathroom. As he slowly started to come awake, opening his eyes briefly, he thought that killing off a couple of bottles of wine at bedtime will do that to you.
Paul tried to ignore the urgent message from his bladder and closed his eyes again. The two of them had barely moved. Paul was still tucked up against Charlotte, his arm resting over her hip.
He could hear her breathing softly.
He almost drifted back into sleep, but he was being forced to face the inevitability of his situation. He was going to have to get up. The question was whether he could disentangle himself from Charlotte without waking her.
First, he gently raised his arm from her hip and let the comforter settle back onto her. Then he slowly edged his body toward his side of the bed, trying to keep the comforter from dragging across Charlotte.
At the same time, he turned himself over so that his back was to hers, and he was facing the wall beyond his side of the bed.
The room was dark, and the moon had shifted in the intervening hours, so there was almost no light slipping through the blinds.
He wondered what time it was. He was worried it might be four or five in the morning. He did not want it to be that close to daybreak. He was weary, and hoping for several more hours of sleep once he was back under the covers. One or two o’clock, even three, would suit him just fine.
The clock radio on his bedside table was showing no display.
That led Paul to wonder if the power was off. If it had gone out, and come back on, the clock would be flashing “12:00.” But right now, there was nothing. It struck him as an odd time for the electrical grid to collapse. There were no high winds, no storm of any kind.
But hang on.
There was a discernible glow coming from the direction of the clock radio. As if the display were on, but at a tenth of its usual illumination.
Lying on his stomach, he extended his left arm, reaching for the clock.
His hand hit something.
It was as though he’d bumped into an invisible wall.
He felt around. Something cold and metallic sat on the bedside table between him and the clock radio. He gave it a slight push, but it did not budge. His fingers scrabbled across the object. One side was smooth, but when his fingers worked around it, he felt countless round pads that recessed slightly at his touch.
Paul felt a chill run from his scalp to his toes.
No longer worrying about disturbing Charlotte, he swung his legs out of the bed and fumbled in the dark under the shade of the bedside lamp, his fingers struggling to find the switch.
He found it, turned the lamp on.
Paul screamed.
Still screaming, he slid off the side of the bed and hit the floor on his back. His scream had morphed into actual words.
“No no no no!”
Charlotte sat bolt upright in bed, throwing back the covers. “Paul?” She spun around, expecting to see him next to her but seeing only his head above the edge of the bed.
She saw the look of horror on his face, then followed his gaze.
And then she screamed, too.
The typewriter sat there on the bedside table, positioned so that it was facing the bed. Charlotte found three words: “Oh my God!”
And then the room went silent as the two of them stared at the hunk of black metal.
“Paul,” Charlotte whispered.
He did not respond. He did not look at her.
“Paul,” she said again.
Slowly, he focused on her. His eyes were wide with shock.
“Paul, there’s paper in it.”
It was true. A piece of paper was rolled into the machine. There were two words of type on it.
Slowly, Paul got to his knees, then stood and approached the typewriter, as though it were a coiled snake ready to strike.
Without touching it, he peered over the machine to read the message that had been left on the single sheet.
It read:
We’re back.
Forty-Two
Paul, naked and trembling, took a step back from the typewriter and said, “This is not happening. This is not fucking happening!”
Charlotte was in the middle of the bed, crouched on her knees, staring disbelievingly at the antique writing machine. “Paul, how did... how is this possible?”
He turned at her and shouted, “I don’t know! This can’t be happening. This has to be a nightmare. I have to wake up. I have to wake up. This can’t be real!” He put his palms to his temples, as though posing for Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
“I was asleep,” he said. “I was right here. Not two feet away. How could this happen? How did it get in here? It can’t be here. It isn’t here.”
“Paul, Paul, listen to me. Paul?”
He looked at her, his eyes wide. “What?”
“This isn’t a dream, Paul. That fucking thing is here.”
“How did it get here? How?” He whirled around.
“Someone’s in the house!” Charlotte said. “Has to be!”
Paul was not about to argue for a supernatural explanation at this point. He ran from the room, barefoot. Charlotte could hear him tearing down the stairs, shouting.
“Where are you?”
Charlotte got off the bed and grabbed a long T-shirt from her dresser.
“Come out, you son of a bitch!”
She pulled it on over her head, then picked up Paul’s boxers from the floor and ran for the stairs.
“You bastard if you’re here I’ ll find you!”
All the kitchen lights were on by the time she reached it, as well as the light in Paul’s small study. But he was not there. She went down the next set of steps. The front door remained locked, but the inside one to the garage was not. She opened it, found the lights already on.
Paul was on the far side of the garage, staring into the open blanket box.
“It was here,” he said. “It was here.” He shook his head angrily. “Shit! Shit shit shit! I forgot to put the books back on top.”
He pointed to the boxes he had lifted off the blanket box during his last visit in here, when he had checked to make sure the typewriter was where it was supposed to be.
“It got out,” he said softly with a tone of wonder. “It escaped.”
“Paul, listen to what you’re saying.”
“What?”
“You’re talking about it like it was some... some animal or something.”
“It moved. It moved.”
“It can’t have moved! That’s not possible! Not by itself!”
“Well then what the hell happened?”
Charlotte took a second to calm herself, then said, “Call Dr. White.”
“What?” It was as though there were some invisible barrier between them keeping him from comprehending her words.
She crossed the garage, handed him his shorts. “For God’s sake, put these on. It’s cold in here.”
“It was open,” he said. “The box was open when I came in here.” He looked imploringly at Charlotte. “How did it do that? How?”
“Paul, I’m begging you.”
“The front door was locked,” he said. “With a new set of locks!”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
He nodded, putting it together. “That pretty much settles it. There was no one in here.” He smiled, as though this were good news. “Don’t you see? No one got in. It did it. It did it on its own.”