Following the others inside, I dropped the towels on the bench.  At the same time I pulled the door shut behind me and leaned back on it.  For the briefest of moments, my position “holding up the door” reminded me of a very different yet similar experience more than three years earlier.

Beth and I were attending one of those hoity-toity book-signing parties for my novel Evolution’s My Gig.  It had won the Hugo Award for Best Novel only a month earlier and the Nebula Award for Best Novel two months before that, so Brody and Penguin organized an over-the-top shindig in celebration.  Both my agent and publisher’s representative flew in from New York to attend.

It was a perfectly dreadful event full of Dallas’ elite—or wannabe elite.  We spent several hours listening to boring tales from rich schleps that probably had no intention of reading my book but wanted desperately to be associated with a local author who’d had more than a single novel show up on store shelves.

It was only my fourth published work and the fifth was already taking shape, but anyone who receives both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, especially for the same book, is a big deal in writing circles.  That meant a celebration was a must.  I only agreed after convincing Penguin to make it a charity event instead of a hobnobbing thrash.

Beth spent much of the evening playing second fiddle as I signed copies of my novel and spoke ad nauseam about my writing with people who didn’t care but asked because it was the polite thing to do.  We both wanted nothing more than to leave.  We even tried sneaking out on two occasions.  Brody had other ideas however, and he was notoriously good at locating me no matter where in the room I’d slinked.

I stood listening to some tedious older gentleman as he told me I’d inspired him to try his hand at writing.  He was explaining the story idea he had; it was coming out as a tiring mess.  Beth clung to my arm and gave her best affectation of interest.

Just as the man started to delve into some unremarkable detail of his life that he felt proved he had a story worth telling, my beautiful wife, always the thinker, began our third attempt to escape by feigning slight illness—”Probably from the heat and excitement, if not a touch of the drink,” she offered with an apologetic smile and a light touch to her forehead—and politely asking if I would be so kind as to escort her to the balcony for some fresh air.  I was only too happy to oblige.

We slipped through the crowd with Beth doing her best to look faint and me trying not to laugh as I helped her.  After stepping through the French doors out to the balcony, we worked our way around to another set of doors nearer the exit and slipped quietly back into the party only long enough to wend our way to the main doors.

As we neared escape, Brody suspiciously appeared out of nowhere, a ghostly apparition materializing just in time—suspiciously just in time.  So we turned sharply and headed into the restroom and coatroom area.

With barely a glance over our shoulders, both of us giggling like schoolchildren, we found what we thought was the coatroom and slipped inside.  We pushed the door shut behind us and leaned back against it as though trying to stop a marauding army.  Our laughing came uncontrollable and uproarious.

An unexpected noise in front of us caught our attention.  We focused in the dim light and saw Dick Weston, Penguin’s representative, standing in the dark.  One of the party’s waiters knelt in front of him looking over his shoulder at us.  Suffice it to say we could never mention Dick’s name after that without immediately seeing that picture: dearest Mr. Weston frantically trying to tuck his genitals back into his tuxedo trousers while the waiter stood up smiling like the Cheshire cat.

I leaned against the door of Carr Beholden in much the same manner Beth and I had leaned against that closet door.  A small grin passed quickly over my face in response to the memory.  I would have traded anything to be back in that stuffy party with the rich and disliked.  I would have traded anything to be back in that broom closet with Beth discovering something about Dick Weston that I never needed to know.  I would have traded anything to be in any other time and place.

The thought faded as quickly as it appeared and with it went whatever good humor I felt.  I locked the door behind me.  I couldn’t exactly justify to myself what made me do it.  The storm isn’t going to come knocking, I thought, but I’m not taking any chances.  Perhaps it was nothing more than fear of the unknown or the gut wrenching feeling I had that there was more to what was happening outside than an unusual atmospheric phenomenon.

No matter the reason or reasons, I locked the deadbolt, the keyless security lock, and even the handle lock.  Had there been a heavy piece of furniture nearby, I would have moved it in front of the door.  Something out there frightened me.  More accurately, something coming with the darkness scared the hell out of me.  I couldn’t define what it was; all I knew was that the feeling was real and I had to respond to it.

Everyone had stopped in the main entryway.  When I turned around after addressing my sudden need for security, they were looking at me as though I was insane.  Was it the grin?  Was it the locks?  Was it both?  It didn’t matter.

“I’m just playing it safe.”  I lied.  I was frightened.  Something was coming and I knew it even if they were in denial.  The dream had shown the darkness full of eyes.  Beth’s voice had told me to run.  Nightmares are scary things, I agree, but that one had left me with an overwhelming feeling of dread.  I considered those adequate reasons for wanting the door locked.  It was my house, after all, and I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone.

I didn’t say anything more but strongly suspected that all but Helene understood what I was doing: trying to keep whatever was outside from getting inside.  In retrospect, Helene probably understood as well.

I looked at her in response to my thoughts and immediately got the impression she was on the verge of a mental collapse.  I couldn’t have blamed her if that suspicion was proved sooner rather than later.  I was having a difficult time wrapping my mind around what was happening and knew she was more fragile.  She needed a diversion.

I reached down and grabbed the towels before stepping over to her.  “Helene, do you think you could dry off the dogs for me?”

She shuttered at the mention of her name.  It drew her back from a dark place.  Her brief recoil made me feel as though I’d struck her.  Still, she needed it.

“Uh…  Well…  Um, yes, Mr. Lloyd, I can do that.”  Her voice came hesitant and quivering.

I handed her the towels and she followed the trail of water into the living room.  As I watched her go, I silently chuckled thinking those damn dogs were all wet and were probably right back up on the love seat.  I can always buy a new one, I hoped.

Carr Beholden’s interior grew darker similar to what happened when a thunderstorm moved into the area.  The sun was chased away and heavy shadows fell over everything.  Yet this time was different.  It was darker and growing darker still.

The leading edge of the storm must already have passed well north and west of us.  It moved fast and stretched past the house by the time we got in the door.  The early afternoon sun was still high yet completely blocked when I last looked.  I suspected what little light we received was being reflected under the top of the darkness as it expanded.

Then the electricity went out.  There was no pop or explosion or other sign; everything just flickered several times, went off for a few seconds, and then came back on.  Carr Beholden had its own battery system that recharged by a diesel generator in the basement.  The monstrous contraption vented outside through the foundation and turned on on automatically as needed.  It could also manually be set to run all the time.

Even with a full tank of gas, I didn’t know how long the generator would last.  I’d never asked about it during the installation; I desperately wished I had.

The fact that the batteries powered the lights and ceiling fans and other electrical equipment gave me pause.  The news reports had said the storms were generating an electromagnetic discharge.  I’d intentionally disregarded that tidbit when I told the McCreary family that we’d have electricity if we lost power service.  Truth told, I didn’t want to admit then that an EM pulse capable of disabling the power grid could also disable most of Carr Beholden’s emergency services.

Standing in the entryway, I looked at the alarm panel next to the door and saw it showed we were indeed on battery power and that the generator remained in standby.  That negated the EM pulse theory.  Losing power from the main grid was caused by something other than electromagnetic interference, or so I thought.  Much later, I would again ponder that and supplement it with a wish that I had paid closer attention in high school physics.

I pushed myself away from the door and headed down the hall toward the east end of the house, toward the sunroom.  As I stepped around the small crowd, I said, “I have to see what’s happening.”

“Me too,” my father said as he followed me.  Mom turned and walked with him.

George echoed the sentiment.  “Might as well take a gander.”  I could hear his heavy footfalls coming down the hall after us.  I suspected Margaret would follow him to the sunroom although I didn’t hear her say as much.

The glass-enclosed room covered the entire first-floor east wall of the house.  A third of the wraparound porch had been glassed in with floor-to-ceiling windows facing east and half-wall windows facing north and south.  Although thick trees and brush shrouded the southern half of the room, the northern half was free of cover.  That end was also nearest the lake.  It would afford the best view toward the east.

When I stepped into that corner of the sunroom, I realized I could no longer see any clear sky to the north or in the sliver of sky I could see to the northwest.  The storm had consumed all of it.  Rather, it had consumed all of it that was visible from my position.  The clouds—or whatever they were—moved quickly enough that I doubted there was much sky left to the west that it hadn’t already hidden from sight.  To the east, on the other hand…  To the east was an image that would be seared into my mind forever.

Dad stopped up beside me and followed my gaze toward that end of the lake.  “Wow…”  His voice lost strength with that one word.  Mom stood silently beside him staring out the windows.

At least a third of the eastern end of the lake had vanished, disappeared into the blackness that hung down from the sky.  Again I thought of a veil dragged behind the leading edge of the storm, except unlike a wedding veil this one was black and ate everything in its path.  More like black heavy-velvet curtains.  I thought it might look like a rain shield from a thunderstorm for anyone observing from the west end of the lake.

In addition to the eastern third of the lake, an even greater expanse of the southern shore was cloaked by the approaching wall cloud.  It struck me yet again how the darkness advancing toward us seemed so utterly without detail, and that made it terribly difficult to judge its distance from us.

How quickly is the cloud deck lowering as the system advances?  Is it already nearing the top of Carr Beholden?  Even as those thoughts ran through my head, I realized I could see more of the lake and shore disappearing, consumed all too quickly by the approaching tempest.  Trees along its edge vanished without a trace, the lake’s blue surface falling into the abyssal depth of this dark and concealing beast.

George and Margaret had reached the sunroom.  No one said anything as we stared in disbelief.  I was reminded momentarily of a black hole gobbling up everything near it, except this one wasn’t waiting for prey to venture too close.  No, this one was actively hunting.  I shivered at that thought and wished my writer’s brain would stop offering metaphors and allusions to describe events.  Reality was proving to be terrifying enough.

We watched the darkness as it rushed toward us.  I became aware of a brief bit of reference when I noticed the tops of the trees were disappearing a split-second before the bottoms.  The obsidian wall tilted.  It dragged behind the high leading edge of the storm just like a veil of ink.  Watching the angle of its advance made me turn southward.  That edge was much closer to us than what we could see over the eastern end of the lake.

At the same time I realized why that was true, Helene’s panicked shout from the living room caught all of us off guard.  “Mom!  Dad!”  Before any of us could turn and head back to that end of the house, the reason for her sudden alarm became apparent.  Carr Beholden was being swallowed.

My prior realization was that, if what we were watching was the same storm that developed over Shreveport—and I never believed there was any reason to doubt that assumption—it expanded in all directions and came at us from the southeast.  That meant the living room would have provided a good view of it as it slithered up the private drive and leaped out of the forest that surrounded us.

From where we stood in the northeast corner of the sunroom, turning toward the southeast provided only a second’s consideration of what we saw before the black wall rushed through the trees and hit the building.  We jumped back as it slammed into the glass.  I had expected it to shatter the windows and pour into the room with us, but instead it struck in silence.  We were mesmerized as a vertical wall of nothingness engulfed that corner of the building before sliding around it and wiping away the last remaining view of reality.

The darkness so deep that it was impossible to focus on it.  The sheer face of the storm slid silently along the windows as we watched it go by.  It moved too quickly to keep in perspective.  Despite that, I was at least momentarily aware of the unnaturally flat surface of the cloud as it slipped by me.  It seemed to paint the world in black with a perfect brush stroke that was as straight as a ruler’s edge.  It wrapped around the northeast corner of the room as quickly as it had hit the southeast corner.

And then the world was gone.  We were inside it, whatever it was.  Carr Beholden had been swallowed in seconds and us with it.

The view out the windows offered a disturbing vista of black, our once shining jewel of green and blue turned raven in a single day.  I couldn’t even describe it to myself.  There was simply no frame of reference for such a thing.  Everything out there was swept away completely and the absence of anything was left in its place.  As I stared through the glass at the darkness that now rested right outside, I understood what it must be like to look into the face of oblivion.

“Come on,” Margaret said to George.  “I don’t need to stand here looking at nothing.  Let’s go check on Helene.”

“Yup,” he replied.  They turned and walked down the hall to the living room.  They called out on their way, “What is it, Helene?”

No more than two seconds had passed since she called out as the last vestiges of light disappeared, but in that time I think we all had seen everything there would be to see.  I wasn’t sure it would always be so yet I suspected as much.  With that assumption tucked away in my head, I still couldn’t pull myself away from the abyss surrounding us.

Is this what infinity looks like, I wondered.  I hoped not.  Featureless and dark and pressed against the windows was perhaps the best example of nothing any human had ever seen.  Even space had stars to look at.  I reached out to touch the glass.  My curiosity was heightened despite my fear.

“No!” Mom shouted, then in a softer voice, “I’m sorry, Vey.  I didn’t mean to yell.”

With my hand halfway to the window, I froze as I contemplated whether she was right and touching it would be a bad thing.  The idea of touching the inside of a tent during a rainstorm suddenly occurred to me.  Would this work the same way?  Would touching the glass make it permeable to the darkness in some way I can’t imagine?  Would it begin seeping through the moment I made contact?

I thought better of it and dropped my hand back to my side.  I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to take the chance.  “That’s okay, Mom.  I understand.  And you’re right, I think.  Why chance it?”

Instead, I stepped closer to the glass and stood with my face just a few inches from it.  I tried to focus on whatever was out there.  It was such complete blackness that my own reflection kept distracting me.  Despite that, I thought I could see something moving.

It was the darkness itself.  It is like a cloud, I thought, and you can see it right up next to the glass.  It’s moving like fog or mist.  Maybe this isn’t so dangerous after all.

The harder I looked, the less certain I felt about what I saw—or thought I saw.  It did appear that there was movement in the darkness, endless black on black mixing in the same way cold milk does when poured into a cup of hot coffee.  It swirled and billowed in and around itself, seethed with unnatural currents roiling and boiling, sinuous and ominous, whorls and spirals and curls looping, arching, coiling.

Was I hallucinating?  I would still not be certain about it later in the day, but a time would come after that when I would have my answer.

[Introduction | Part 6 | Part 8]