THE FEAR KEEPS US HERE
By Daniel Skye
Stanley Bellinger would periodically get up from
the sofa to stoke the logs on the fire with a wrought iron poker.
The power kept cutting in and out,
and the heater would click off every time the power went. So Stanley was
depending on the roaring fire to keep him warm through the night.
Just past the red brick fireplace
was a set of tall, narrow glass sliding doors. Every so often, Stanley would
walk around to the doors and peer out. He wanted to see how much his back was
going to be suffering after he shoveled himself out of the driveway tomorrow.
The last storm they had, Stanley threw his back out shoveling all that snow.
And that was just fourteen inches of
snow. This was a mountain. Every time he looked out the glass doors, all he
could see was white. More than two feet of snow had accumulated, and the
weather stations were predicting another six inches before the storm let up.
Before Stanley lost his satellite signal, the local news said this was already
a record snowfall for Long Island.
The local authorities had issued a
mandatory curfew. They didn’t want anyone driving in these conditions until the
storm passed and the trucks had a chance to plow and salt the roads.
You’d
have to be bat-shit crazy to drive in this weather, Stanley thought. If he
opened those sliding doors and stepped outside, the snow would be up to his
knees.
Stanley returned to the sofa, watched
the orange flames dance from the wind and listened to the wood crackle and
hiss. This was not how he wanted to spend his evening. Staring at the fire was akin
to watching paint dry. He was trapped indoors and needed something to occupy
his mind before cabin fever set in.
When Shelly was still around, they’d
play cards or a board game to pass the time. Or they’d just sit and talk while
they rode the storm out. Stanley secretly loved it when they lost power. Shelly
would break out her candle collection and Stanley would make a fire. It created
a romantic, intimate atmosphere. They’d sip wine by candlelight and cuddle by
the fire to keep warm. They’d discuss their futures, or rather, discuss Shelly’s
plans for the future.
One of those plans included eventually
finding a new place to live. Shelly didn’t care for how secluded the property
was. There wasn’t a house in either direction for a quarter of a mile. And with
the tall hedges out in front, the driveway was barely visible from the road.
They had an alarm system, but that wasn’t enough to put her mind at ease.
And one of the systems biggest
faults was that during a power outage, the alarm system would deactivate. It
would only reactivate once they regained power.
But the alarm system wasn’t what
concerned Stanley. It was the thought of moving. Stanley felt perfectly at home
in their spacious, luxurious six-bedroom, three-bathroom Hamptons palace. Stan earned
that house.
Stan worked in Hollywood as a movie
producer, which was why the living room was adorned with framed movie posters.
Shelly had framed them herself with museum glass so there would be no glare
from the lights.
But Stanley worked his way up from
the bottom. He started out as an assistant for various producers–kissing asses,
fetching coffee, answering phones, jotting down messages, polishing screenplays,
and polishing cars, too.
Now people were fetching Stanley’s
coffee and taking his calls for him. But it wasn’t pride or ego that stopped
him from moving. And it certainly wasn’t a money situation. They could easily
afford another house of equal grandeur. But Stanley had grown attached to his
palace in the Hamptons.
It brought him back to something his
father had said years ago: “The fear keeps us here.” In other words, the fear
of abandoning your comfort zone. It’s what keeps people grounded, stationary.
Sure, Stanley would jet off to
California for meetings and casting calls and film premieres. But when it was
over, he always had a place to call home. He could always return to his comfort
zone.
“The fear keeps us here.” That’s
what Stanley’s father had meant. At least that’s what Stanley chose to take
away from it. It could have just been incoherent ramblings. Stanley’s father
used to say a lot of things that didn’t make sense. He was suffering from
dementia and would often mutter bewildering profanities like “cock burger” and “donkey
fuck.”
But Shelly didn’t share her husband’s
sentiments. Shelly warned him about that property. She said it was an easy
target. And Stanley told her she had seen one too many home invasion movies. “Stuff
like that doesn’t happen in the Hamptons,” Stanley assured her.
But all the guarantees in the world
could not convince Shelly to stay. Not after Stanley told her the truth about
his affair.
They had been divorced for almost a year. Shelly tolerated a
lot over the years. She tolerated Stanley’s immature attitude, the way he
laughed at inappropriate situations, his lack of self-awareness, and the way
he’d always hog the remote and chew with his mouth open.
She even dealt with the PS4 and the movie posters that made
her living room resemble the lobby of a movie theater. But what she couldn’t
tolerate was his infidelity. Stanley had slept with his secretary. And it was
eating him up inside. He had to confess. Deep down, she knew something was
wrong. He wore his guilt like a wristwatch.
And when he told her, she packed her
bags and was out the door and on a plane to Chicago that same night.
Shelly had hired the best divorce attorney money could buy and
got half of Stanley’s assets in the settlement. But that wasn’t what pained
Stanley. He’d give all his movie money away for one more day with Shelly.
The wind howled viciously. Sixty-mile-an-hour gusts hammering
against the windows. The fire was starting to blow out, so Stanley lifted
himself up from the sofa and stoked the logs with the poker and crumpled more
newspaper to feed to the flames.
Stanley could hear a soft din over the harsh winds. It was
coming from outside.
It wasn’t knocking. It was tapping.
Someone, or something,
was tapping against the glass sliding doors.
He heard a loud bang and dropped the fireplace poker, the
pointed end nearly impaling his foot. It sounded like a baseball being hurled
at his windows. He walked around the fireplace, over to the slider, where he
stood in the awe. In the center of the glass was a huge spider web crack.
With all that snow blanketing every surface and no outdoor
lights, it took a second for Stan’s eyes to focus and adjust. Through the
glass, he saw what looked like tentacles.
Dangling tentacles of an unholy creature that seemed to reach
down from the sky. The tentacles extended from the eaves of Stanley’s roof and
rested in the white snow below. Stanley didn’t know what they could be attached
to. He didn’t want to know.
The tentacles raised themselves from the ground, looking
poised to strike. They whipped and lashed through the air, striking the glass
again and causing the crack to spread.
Stanley gasped. There was no one to call for help. 911 would
connect him to the local police, who would not be able to reach him in time.
Not in these hazardous conditions. They hadn’t even started plowing the roads
yet.
And even if they could reach him, what would Stanley tell
them? If he called them and started frantically spouting off about monsters and
tentacles, they’d think he was a drunk, a loon, a crank caller. They end the
call before he even had a chance to convince them.
The tentacles struck the glass a third time and the cracks
spread from top to bottom. The tentacles rose again, hanging in the air for the
briefest of moments, almost staring back at him through the wall of cracked
glass. All it took was one more blow for the glass to shatter.
Three long, snake-like tentacles crept inside the house,
crawling across the hardwood floor. Their movements caused them to bulge, the way muscles bulge when an arm is flexed. Stanley, biting his lower lip to stifle a
scream, inched away slowly. These were no ordinary octopus tentacles. These
were something straight of a low budget horror or Sci-Fi flick Stanley could’ve
seen himself investing in.
These tentacles had eyes, and mouths, and teeth. They rose
and seemed to sniff the air, as if they smelled the fear emanating from his
body. Stanley ran around the red brick fireplace and grabbed the poker from the
floor.
One of the tentacles crept around the fireplace and Stanley
brought the fireplace poker down with force, piercing its grey exterior. He
retracted the pointed end and the tentacle drew back. The others rose to meet
his height.
One went straight for his face. It got a hold of his glasses
and ripped them from his face. It took his spectacles between its needle-like
teeth and snapped them in half with one bite, then gulped it down like it was
swallowing a piece of candy.
The other tentacle struck, nearly taking a chunk from Stanley’s
head. Instead, it took away a mouthful of his jet-black hair. The tentacles
danced around as Stanley jabbed and swung at them with the wrought iron poker.
The wounded tentacle–the one oozing yellow puss–returned and coiled
around the poker and snatched it from Stanley’s hand, flinging it across the
living room. The wrought iron poker shattered one of Stanley’s glass movie poster
displays and fell out of reach.
Stanley grabbed a long, jagged chunk of museum glass from the
floor. And when the next tentacle went to strike, Stanley stabbed it through
the bottom of its mouth. It sagged to the floor and went limp.
Before its brothers–or sisters–could retaliate, Stanley was
ascending the staircase. He reached the master bedroom and locked himself in.
Shelly was concerned about being out in the middle of
nowhere, but she was also vehemently against guns. And she had won the argument
when Stanley suggested getting one. Defenseless, Stan’s eyes searched for an
escape route.
He glanced up at the rectangular skylights that should have
been buried in snow. But both skylights were painted over with a grey, lifeless
texture. This was the source of the tentacles. A creature larger than anything
that should rightfully exist. This massive, monstrous abomination had engulfed
his entire rooftop.
The skylights shattered from the enormous pressure they were
enduring, and the glass rained down on him. Two more tentacles came slithering
in. They coiled around his ankles, snatched him off his feet, and sucked
Stanley up through the hole in the skylight.
His screams and cries for help were short-lived. It took less
than two minutes for the tentacles to devour him. In that time, the only name
he screamed out, the only person he cried for, was Shelly.
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