Penumbra - Chapter 2

Time seemed to prowl around me like a hungry animal. When I started breathing again, I coughed up a cloud of dust. Light had gone completely in my absence, and in the night sky, a stream of silver stars wove light enough to examine my trembling hands. Ten fingers, ten toes. I thought. At least I didn’t get turned into some alien or anything. I stood and stretched. The stiffness told me I had been on the ground for some time. I looked up to assess the time.

Joshua Tree proper only held a few thousand people, and we were living miles away from town. Star Lane was an apt name for the dirt road that let to our little house, because you could see thousands of them. Tourists flocked to the monument every year for that exact reason. So when I looked up, I was not surprised to see a luminous blanket of white milky-way, studded with more twinkling stars than I could ever hope to count.

I was, however, surprised to see the streak of blue, unfamiliar nebula cutting a long, winding path through the southern sky. My face scrunched up in confused disapproval as I looked for the four tell-tale stars of Ursa Major- the big dipper. I shook my head. This can’t be real. No Ursa Major. Nor its little cousin. I shook my head harder and spun east- Mars had been humming along right next to the moon the past week or so, I just had to figure out where the darkened sphere was right now. I don’t believe this. My eyes jumped from one unfamiliar constellation to the next. The moon was full, when it had been a waning crescent before. And no sign of the thrumming reddish speck of Mars either. Instead, something else sat by the moon, a darkened spot. Okay, alright, Thomas, okay. I exhaled deeply, trying to fend off my panic. You clearly weren’t dreaming. Something was obviously not right. I struggled to make sense of the eerie white mist and the punishing mental breakdown it brought. It talked about some weird job it had to do… something about purpose…It threatened me, and then it made good on that threat for trying to talk to it… I had begun walking, absentmindedly, through the brush as I pondered. Starlight and moonlight granted me just enough brightness to avoid walking into a cactus, and my ears were on constant alert for a hiss, growl or rattle.

Being out at night was far less than ideal. The dangerous cold-blooded creatures were in their hidey-holes, but the desert night belongs to a different host of dangers. Coyotes, cougars, bobcats, mountain lions and even the odd wild dog, to name a few. But Tarantulas scared me more than any of those. I had been surprised by a massive specimen when I stepped out to pee one night and I kid you not, it reared up and stared me down and I had to change my pants before bed.

Working the problem of what I had experienced passed the time, and eventually the dark silhouette of my house stood against the quiet sand and pokey trees of our sprawling lot. It was a flat roofed single-story house, barely 700 square feet inside. A single white box stood up over the roof – the swamp cooler. It normally hummed loud enough to find home by sound from a mile away, and the smell of damp, uncleaned mesh on the outside would lead your nose home if the sound didn’t. Tonight, I could only smell the old thing, it was silent as the grave. I wiped sweat from my head and frowned. That’s not right. It was plenty hot out. And besides, the house was far too dark. There never wasn’t a light on in the living room. My mother lived in front of the television, and Lifetime, Oxygen, and Nick-at-Night ran a constant cycle at the foot of her futon, even late into the night.

I bit my lip and held my chest, trying to control my breathing. Panic was trying to step in again. The quiet stillness of the night was pressing down on me like I was a tin can in the deep sea. No bug noises. No Owls. No Coyotes. I hadn’t noticed the deafening silence until now, as I was too busy thinking about the vapor-lady and her horrific eye boring a hole though me and exposing my nerve, or lack of nerve, as it seemed. But it was indeed too quiet out here, and the house looked cold and lonely. Disused and abandoned. I didn’t have any choice in the matter, though, so I stepped toward the back door. Doing this, I instinctively went to take my BB rifle off my shoulder, but I had left it out in the clearing by the big Yucca plant. That’s great. I have to go back tomorrow. I thought to myself, angry that I would need to return to the place where everything had stopped making sense.

I opened the back door and stepped carefully into the kitchen. I unclenched my jaw, which had begun to hurt from how hard I was gritting my teeth. The dead air hanging in the pitch-black hall in front of me seemed to push on for miles. At the end of the rectangular galley-style kitchen was a set of white shelves that also served as the dividing wall between the kitchen and living room. A small round dining table sat in the corner to the left, just past the refrigerator, which notably sat silent, its familiar droning hum conspicuously absent in the ominous gloom. Just beyond the wall of built-in shelves, one could normally see what made-for-tv movie Mom was watching. But the house was completely dark, the air utterly still. The swamp cooler wasn’t running, nor the refrigerator. The TV wasn’t on, and the clock on the microwave and oven were dark.

I carefully edged forward, closing the back door behind me. As I squinted into the gloom, the silence was punctured by a sudden rush of air, like a deep exhale directly by my right ear. My hair stood on end as the sudden breath grazed my neck and I spun backwards, sending a glass on the edge of the sink smashing into the basin. Standing in the kitchen in front of me was a spirit comprised of familiar white smoke.