“Did you notice that it was afraid of my pocket calculator?” Desmond asked. He was pacing the length of the kitchen, back and forth, from the pantry door to the wooden cot they had set up for Jennifer by the refrigerator. “And it wouldn’t touch the electric blanket either.”
“Why is that?” Mrs. Kingsley asked without interest. Her granddaughter was sleeping like an angel, and her heart pounded with fear for the child. She had to fight down the impulse to run a rough old hand over hair so fine it could break your heart.
“I don’t know, but did you see the way it squeezed into the wall? Like it was boneless, or something more than boneless. I’ll bet it doesn’t mass much of anything at all!”
He was getting excited now. Alma Kingsley simply tuned out his voice and let him rant on. Stephanie had always said that problem-solving was his forte, what he was most at home with. Given a logic problem—a crossword puzzle or a program that had crashed—and some shred of clue, his intuition would worry it to death or solution. To Alma Kingsley’s way of thinking, this was a good argument that problem-solving logic was not one of the civilized skills.
It was only when he moved her brand new toaster-oven to the kitchen table and began disassembling it that she was finally moved to object. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“I’m going to wrap a resistance coil,” he said, absorbed in his chore and talking so fast his words ran together. “Look, this thing is obviously sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, right? Now, assuming its shape is maintained through bound charges, then it would move by shifting electrical potential within itself. That would explain how it moves so fluidly. So—”
“Desmond,” she said, her patience wearing thin, “just what are you trying to do?”
He looked up from his work, puzzled. “I’m building a signal-interrupter. Didn’t I make myself clear?” Without waiting for a response, he bent back down over the table, uncoiling wires from the heating elements.
She closed her eyes, calmed herself. “Just what will this signal-interrupter do when it’s built?”
“Well, basically—” He broke something out of the toaster-oven, glanced at it, threw it aside. “Basically, it ought to render this creature totally immobile anywhere within—oh, let’s say a fifteen-twenty foot radius. More, probably, but that much at least.”
For the first time in her life, Alma Kingsley wondered if God might not have had reasons for creating Desmond. “You can do this?” she asked anxiously. “Tonight?”
He favored her with a vulgar, lopsided grin. “Old hoss,” he said, “give me half an hour, and we have got it dicked!”
With no warning, all the lights went out at once, plunging them into complete darkness.
“Oh shit,” Desmond said.
Calmly, because she’d been through blackouts before, Mrs. Kingsley felt and twisted the knobs on the gas range. One by one the burners came on, filling the room with an eerie, flickering light.
By sheer bad luck, the furnace was off at the instant the power went. It was a gas furnace, but it operated off of a solid state programmable electric thermostat, and wouldn’t go back on again until the thermostat told it to. But it wasn’t really crucial; she lit the oven, leaving the door open for heat.
After some clumsy, fearful rummaging through the dark pantry, she unearthed a hurricane lamp. Its chimney had gulls painted on the side, and the transparent reservoir was filled with blue scented oil. Still, when she set it on the kitchen table, the light it shed was warm and friendly, and she could turn off the range.
Desmond, meanwhile, had found the utility flashlight in its recharger bracket by the basement door. He stood in the middle of the pantry, flicked it on and off, and then said, “What does this house have—fuses or circuit breakers?”
Alma Kingsley stared at the man in disbelief. His face was dark with shadow, his eyes lost in blackness. He was a silhouette creature, almost all outline and no substance, one hand on the doorknob of the cellar door. “Desmond, this isn’t the city. A power line is down. Going into the cellar and flicking a switch is not going to restore the electricity.”
She didn’t have to be able to see the face to know the smug, superior smile that crossed it now; she could hear it in his voice. “Let’s not get all worked up, now. Maybe a line is down. But the more likely reason is that a power transient has kicked out the main circuit breaker. There’s no reason for us to spend a night in the cold and dark when just a moment’s effort can restore the power.” He opened the door.
She peered past him, down into the cellar—it was a perfect, lightless black. Vague colors swam before her, visual hallucinations brought up by the absolute lack of light. The blackness crawled with menace. The only sound anywhere was the hissing of the gas oven.
Involuntarily, she clutched his arm. “For God’s sake, Desmond, you don’t know what’s down there!”
Desmond turned the flashlight on her face. She stood blinking as he studied her. “Don’t be such a wuss,” he said. “Whatever that thing is, we know that it’s somewhere above us, not below.”
He shook free of her grip and moved to the top of the cellar steps, hesitated for a moment, looking down. “Desmond,” she said, so frightened that she found herself actually pleading, “this is unwise. You’re acting like a character in a monster movie! Everybody in the theater would be yelling ‘Don’t go down there!’ by this point. Stay up here with us. We need you here.” It galled her to speak the words, words she’d never imagined she’d hear herself say—but it was true.
Desmond turned his head to look back at her, and grimaced. “Look,” he said, a defensive note creeping into his voice, “this thing kills people, and it’s on the loose. The only defense we have against it uses electricity. Either I go down there and reset the breakers, or we sit up here in the dark and wait to die.” After a second of silence, he grinned at her, the arrogance, the boundless self-confidence and self-assurance she’d always found so odious in the man already returning to his face after a fleeting moment of uncertainty. “Beside, I’ll be quick…and I’ll be careful!”
He was wrong, horribly wrong, but she didn’t have the arguments to confute him with, only a horrid assurance that he was making a stupid move. Desmond shone the flash down the stairs.
A thin line of worn wooden treads led downward into darkness, a trace of light glimmering on the walls to either side. When Desmond raised the flash slightly, a pale circle formed on the whitewashed rock wall just beyond the landing. “Damn,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose the circuit box is on the near wall?”
“No, it’s on the wall opposite, at the front of the house.”
Abruptly, Desmond turned and walked back into the kitchen. For a giddy moment, Mrs. Kingsley thought he had come to his senses. But he only paused by his daughter and gently placed something on the cot beside her sleeping head. The calculator. He switched it on, then turned back toward the cellar.
“For the love of Christ, Desmond!”
But, ignoring her completely, he stepped down onto the top stair. It groaned under his weight. Slowly he descended, clutching the loose railing with his free hand. The light danced and bobbed on the basement wall, growing brighter as he approached, then darting to the side and disappearing as he turned away. Briefly, there was the faintest shimmer of reflected light, and then nothing.
The air from below was warm, like an animal’s breath on her face. Staring down into the liquid blackness, Mrs. Kingsley felt her every nerve on end. She strained to hear, to track her son-in-law’s progress below by sound alone. But the dirt floor muffled his footsteps, and damped down the noise he made.