Intuition

Short Fiction

Intuition

Note: Stories at Until Night Falls are works of dark fiction and may contain elements of violent crime, horror, and mature themes/subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.

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Garrett Newman jolted awake. It was a sweltering summer night, and he had gone to bed with his bedroom window open and an ancient Army surplus table fan blowing. It was a loud 1950s model of all-metal construction with two speeds—on and off—and when it was on, it was like having a model airplane blasting in his bedroom all night, but Garrett knew it was his only relief. Sleeping on the top floor in a house without air conditioning, the noise was a tradeoff he had to make for comfort’s sake.

Why he was suddenly awake, he didn’t know.

He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the clock on his nightstand. The numbers flipped rolodex style, and a black metal card with white digits showed 2:41 AM under a pale green light. The clock normally lit up the corner of his room like a nightlight, but it occurred to Garrett that the light was dimmer tonight somehow. The table fan, instead of blasting, was humming a low frequency buzz and turning like a broken windmill in a lazy breeze.

He pushed back his covers and sat up in bed, listening. He heard nothing that alarmed him, but there had to be a reason he was suddenly awake. He looked at the fan again.

Maybe it was the sudden lack of noise.

He got out of bed. At the top of the stairs, he paused momentarily. He was thirteen years old—just old enough to have begun conquering his fear of the dark—but walking a patrol through the darkened house was a task that required the mustering of some will. He strained his eyes in the dark, watching for any sign of movement at the bottom of the darkened stairwell. He took a deep breath, gulped once, and descended the stairs, which creaked under his weight.

At the bottom of the stairs, he looked down the hall to the right, toward the room where his mom and step-dad slept. Their bedroom door was partially ajar and he could see flickers of white light on the wall cast by the 9-inch black and white TV that was almost always on in their room, accompanied by a low murmur of sound. He took a left and walked down the dimly lit hallway to the dining room, where he paused in the archway. The patio door was open with only the screen door separating the dining room from the back yard.

Garrett approached the screen door quietly and peered into the back yard with his toes on the threshold.

It was not a hot summer night. Instead of crickets and the occasional yowl of a nocturnally randy neighborhood cat, Garrett confronted blizzard-level winds of a violent snowstorm that had blanketed their normally patchy brown and green yard in the desert with an inch of snow. At the far side of the yard, an eight-foot section of their rickety privacy fence sagged in the top corner, as if someone had climbed over it, and a series of footprints in the snow stood out in a perfect, clear path from the fence, right to his feet.

Creak.

A sound came from somewhere in the house.