Airtight, A Tonight's Terror Original

A cat burglar rides a record-breaking heatwave through a city's wealthiest neighborhoods, one clean job after another. Ten houses in, he's starting to feel untouchable.

No AI Writing. No AI Narration. 

Epilogue Track, Au Couvenant by Alexander Borodin, produced by DL Sounds.

Intro/Outro: D. Moore

Tonight's Terror. Original horror stories told in the dark. 

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This audio is an original short horror story written and performed by Tonight’s Terror (C.S. Austin). It is not adapted from, based on, or affiliated with any existing novel, audiobook, film, or copyrighted intellectual property. All writing, narration, and production elements are original and owned by the creator unless otherwise credited.

Transcript

Cold Open

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Everybody needs a little luck now and then. Sometimes the ancient Greek playwrights needed it too. When their heroes found themselves trapped with no way out, when the story had backed itself into a corner it couldn't escape, a god would descend onto the stage, lowered by a crane, and everything was set right in the span of a few lines. Deus Ek Machana, God from the Machine. Critics have hated the device for as long as it's existed, and for good reason, it's a cheat. A god shouldn't have to descend from the heavens to solve a problem the hero couldn't solve himself. The hero should earn their own ending. Real life is even less forgiving. When trouble finds you, nothing descends from above to save you from the consequences of your own choices. There's no perfectly timed divine intervention, no author waiting in the wings to make sure everything works out before the final curtain falls. You get yourself into it, and more often than not, you get yourself out. Or, you don't get out at all. Tonight, no promises.

Channel Intro

SPEAKER_00 1:18

You're listening to Tonight's Terror, original horror stories to hear in the dark. Subscribe and share if you're a fan. And now, tonight's story.

Story

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Ten nights, ten houses, ten clean exits. The heat had been a gift I didn't expect. It started in late June and refused to break. Day after day of triple digits that turned the city into something slow and stupid. Windows stayed open because nobody could afford to run air conditioning around the clock. Or they could afford it, the units roared through the night, drowning out anything a careful man might do in the dark. I'd never had a season like this. Probably never would again. The street was empty at half past midnight. The asphalt still held the day's heat, a low simmer coming up through the soles of my sneakers. Every house I passed had its windows dark, its curtains drawn against a sun that had set hours ago, but hadn't taken the temperature with it. Somewhere behind one of those windows, someone was probably still awake, sweating through a sheet, listening to a box fan turn against the air. I like to imagine that. It kept me sharp. I'd made off with more than I could count without a ledger. Cash in rubber bands, a drawer's worth of watches, bags I recognized by their hardware alone. The brands told me exactly what they'd fetched before I even checked the lining. A high end drone still in the box. A telephoto camera kit, some rich man's hobby that he'd never gotten around to using. All of it sitting in a storage unit on the east side, untouched, because I hadn't stopped long enough to sell any of it. There'd be time for that. Right now there was only the string, and the string didn't break itself. I knew what happened when a heat wave ended. People came back to themselves. They started locking doors again, checking windows before bed, noticing things they'd been too tired and too hot to notice. I meant to be finished working long before then. The house I'd picked was two blocks up, past where I'd left my car facing the right direction for a quick exit. I'd scouted it the afternoon before, watched a family loading suitcases into the back of their Range Rover, with the unhurried motion of people who had somewhere to be and time to get there. A vacation, maybe a week, maybe two. Either way, long enough. I only needed 15 minutes. It came into view, white and symmetrical. Two stories, hedges trimmed into shapes that took some unreal money to maintain. No car in the driveway. Good. I crossed the lawn toward a side door, and the world exploded into noise behind me. I nearly went straight out of my skin. My hand found the fence before I told it to. It took a full second to place the sound. A compressor kicking on, the deep mechanical shutter of a central air unit dragging itself back to life. Just the house, keeping itself cool for no one. Rich people did that, paid to keep an empty house comfortable in case the walls got warm and complained. Probably. I stood there a moment, waiting for my pulse to come back down into a reasonable range. A dull man got caught. I looked behind me, the line of trees that created a boundary between this house and the neighbors. Then I got to work. The doorknob locked gave up almost as an afterthought, no deadbolt engaged, nothing between me and the kitchen but a thin strip of brass that had never been tested by anyone with intent. I stepped inside and let the door click shut behind me. The air was cold, colder than any house I'd hit that week. Within seconds the sweat on the back of my neck had gone clammy. I stood and listened. Nothing but the hum of the unit working through the vents. I moved the way I always moved, room by room, silent, cataloging. Kitchen empty, dining room empty. A den with a leather sofa that looked like it had never been sat on. Empty. I didn't relax until I'd covered the ground and confirmed what the driveway had already told me. No one home. Still, I kept my feet quiet climbing the stairs. Old habits paid for themselves. At the top of the landing, a lamp flared on above me, motion triggered someplace, and I dropped, low, on instinct, already moving toward it before I'd finished registering what it was. My fingers found the cord at the base of a side table lamp, and the hall went dark again. I stayed crouched a few seconds, watching the yard next door through the window at the end of the corridor for any change in the dark outside. No light coming on, no dark barking, nothing. A neighbor doesn't think twice about a Porsche light. A neighbor absolutely notices a light going on and off in an empty house at one in the morning. I'd learned that lesson early in a town I no longer worked. I'd been lucky to have learned a lot of hard lessons the easy way, without jail time. The bedrooms gave up what bedrooms always gave up in these big houses. A jewelry box gave up a fistful of rings and bracelets. Nothing locked, nothing hidden. A closet safe that turned out to be not a safe at all, just a filing cabinet somebody's contractor had bolted to the floor for show. Rolls of hundreds in a sock drawer, held together with rubber bands like the owner didn't trust banks. A Louis Vuitton bag still holding its shape on a shelf and the dust bag folded neatly beside it. I filled the backpack first, then the duffel. Working fast now, done second-guessing the house. Ten minutes after the AC started me out of my shoes, I was back on the sidewalk with both bags heavy against my shoulders, the night air closing hot and thick around me again. There was plenty of danger out on the sidewalk, certainly more than in an empty house. I preferred to move through backyards in the dark, particularly once my bags were filled, but this neighborhood wasn't laid out that way. One glance out the window from a night owl neighbor could end with a phone call to the cops. Though I'd be long gone before a cop could get here, unless I was extremely unlucky. But I wasn't unlucky. Not that month. I could see my car when I noticed a house that hadn't caught my eye the day before. It was well kept and large. Two good signs. I gave the place one more look before closing the distance between me and my car. Light blue house, number 114, and best of all, every first floor window open. See you soon, I murmured into the dark. I got in the car and sat for a second before I turned the key. Ten for ten. I didn't know how to feel about that, except large, untouchable, like the whole city had been built to test me, and I'd passed every question without breaking a sweat that mattered. I pulled away from the curb and turned my headlights on at the end of the street. I came back to the neighborhood the next evening at seven, parked where I could watch the light blue house without watching it too, obviously, and gave it two hours. Nothing moved. No car in the driveway, no lights, no shape passing behind a window. A sprinkler system kicked on across the street at quarter past eight and ran its cycle and shut off again. Otherwise, the block sat still in the heat. At nine, I gave it a rest and drove to a bar on the other side of town, someplace with laminated menus and a bartender who didn't know my face. I ordered a burger and turned the house over in my mind while I ate. No one leaving. That was the piece I didn't love. Every other house on the string, I'd watched a family load a car and pull away, something concrete to hang the job on. This one had given me nothing but open windows and an empty driveway. And empty driveways lied all the time. Someone worked late, someone didn't own a car, someone was home right now, asleep in a room with a window cracked because the air conditioning couldn't keep up with a summer like this one. I finished the burger and told myself the windows were the tell. Someone was either home or coming home reasonably soon. Open windows meant an empty house cooling itself the cheap way. If you were gone for a week, you'd lock everything. On the other hand, the house had been completely still and dark for two consecutive visits. Empty, I thought. Empty at least for a while. That was my read, and my reads hadn't missed all summer. I drove back around 11:30 and parked down the street from the house again, close enough to watch it, far enough that a curtain twitch wouldn't put a plate number in anyone's head. Midnight came and the house hadn't flinched. Dark, quiet, and every window on the first floor standing open to the night, curtains hanging dead behind the screens. I sat with the engine off and thought through it one more time. I hesitated because there was a difference between a burglar and a robber, and I'd built a career out of knowing which one I was. A robber took things from people. A robber needed someone home, needed a gun or a knife or a fist, needed to look a person in the eye and make them afraid enough to hand something over. That wasn't me. I was a burglar. I took things from houses, empty ones, quiet ones, houses that gave up whatever they were holding without anyone in them to even lay eyes on me. The distinction mattered to me, and if the time ever came, it would matter to a judge. I'd never once stood over a person and demanded anything. I intended to keep it that way. So I watched the house a while longer, until the watching stopped teaching me anything new. No dog, no baby monitor screen glowing in an upstairs window, no car easing up the driveway at the last minute, nothing but a house sitting open and dark. I was relatively sure. Relatively sure had gotten me through ten houses in the last month. I got out of the car, crossed the street at an angle that kept me out of the streetlight's reach, and walked the length of the front yard toward the nearest open window. I'd pulled my mask over my face before getting out of the car. No need for a doorbell camera to make me before I even got inside. I stopped at the edge of the lawn and let the ritual start. It always began the same way. A slow breath in through the nose, held, let out slowly through the mouth. Three times. My old man had taught me that actually. Not for this, for something else entirely. Some anger management book he'd bought after his second DUI. And I'd stolen it, the way I stole everything else useful that crossed my path. The mask settled warm against my mouth on the third breath. Then the story started. The one I told myself before every job, worn smooth now from repetition. Barely felt like a lie anymore. This person stole from me. Not this house specifically, not this family, whoever they were. The idea worked better than that. Slippery on purpose. So it never had to survive contact with an actual face. Somewhere out there, someone like the people in this house had taken something from someone like me. A promotion that went to somebody's nephew, a handout nobody ever offered when I could have used one. The house itself was evidence enough. The hedges cut into shapes, the trim so white it looked wet, even at midnight, even under nothing but a quarter moon. Nobody built something this comfortable without stepping on somebody to do it. I just couldn't say who exactly, and I'd learned a long time ago not to look too closely at that particular gap in the argument. I need to get in and take my things back. I felt my shoulders drop an inch when I said it, even silently. That was the whole function of the phrase, the whole point of the ritual. It made this make sense. Relax. Do what needs to be done and get out. It made the next 15 minutes feel less like theft and more like a debt finally getting collected. Years overdue, interest included. I believed I was a decent person. The belief had never really needed much evidence. I'd never raised a hand to anyone. I paid for my groceries, tipped well when I had cash on me, held doors for people. Most days, I could fold the burglar up small enough in my mind that he barely took up any room at all. Somewhere down the block, a sprinkler system hissed to life. My sister's kid was sick. Some rare thing with a name I still couldn't pronounce, the kind of diagnosis that came with insurance denials stapled to every appointment invoice like a matching set. I sent money every month. She never asked where it came from. Maybe she'd guessed years ago and decided it was easier to not know for sure. Maybe the bills had simply made the question irrelevant. That was enough. It turned a burglar into something closer to a provider. The mask became a uniform instead of a disguise. That was the man I told myself I was. Standing on somebody's lawn at midnight with a mask pulled over half my face. My robbing hood. Some crooked, unlicensed redistribution of wealth nobody had asked me to run, moving money from people who'd never miss it toward a hospital billing department that never once stopped asking for more. It made the next part possible. It turned the mask from a thing criminals wore into the kind of thing a man could almost feel proud of. Somewhere behind the house, wind chimes stirred, although the air was still. Three notes and then nothing. I told myself the AC unit had kicked on again, pushing the air to move them. A dog, three yards over, gave one bark and cut itself off mid-sound, the way the dog does when something makes it change its mind. Every house had its noises. After I'd deemed a house ready, I'd learned to clock these sounds and then move ahead, just as I'd filed away the smell, drifting out the open window. Something sweetish, chemical, gone before I could place it. I reached the window, hooked two fingers under the screen, and told myself one final time that I was one of the good ones. The window screen gave easier than the last one had, and I dropped down into a dark that didn't feel like a room. It felt like a void. I stood there, half crouched with my hands still braced on the sill, waiting for my eyes to find an edge, a wall, a piece of furniture, anything to hang a shape on, and they didn't. No streetlight leaked in behind me. I'd made sure of that. I picked the side of the house facing away from the road. No moonlight through the glass, not that I could find. Just black, thick enough that I could have been standing at the mouth of a cave instead of inside somebody's living room. I held still and let my breathing settle, the way I always did in the first few seconds of a new house, giving my eyes the courtesy of time. It didn't help. Far off, or what felt like far off, I thought I could make out the paler outline of a doorway, a rectangle just slightly less black than everything around it, floating there, without walls to attach it to. I held on to that shape the way you hold on to a single word in a language you don't speak. I had the headlamp for exactly this kind of dark, red light, low output, more than enough to work by, and dim enough that it wouldn't throw a glow through the windows for some insomniac neighbor to catch sight of. I just didn't like using it unless I had to. My hand found the switch on the side of my head, thumb resting on it, ready. But I made myself wait one more second. Get my feet under me first, get a foothold before I lit anything up and gave my position away, even to an empty house. I dropped the rest of the way down and planted both feet on the floor. They didn't move. I registered it as strange before I registered it as potentially dangerous. A kind of resistance under my soles that had no business being there, like the floor had gone tacky in the heat. I went to take a step forward toward the pale outline of the doorway, and neither foot came with me. I rocked my weight back, tried the other foot instead. Same result. Both of them fixed the floor, no give to either one, like I'd stepped down into wet cement already gone hard. I pulled harder, first one leg then the other, and I could feel exactly how stuck I was with every ounce of effort that got me nowhere. I threw everything I had into my back leg, and it came free all at once, so suddenly I lost my balance. My foot came loose, my shoes stayed exactly where it was, torn clean off. I pitched forward with my other foot still fixed to the floor, no free leg to catch myself on, and I went down hard onto my hands and knees with a crash that felt like it belonged to somebody twice my size. It was loud, louder than all the noise I'd made in every house I'd hit that month combined. I froze there and listened, heart slamming, waiting for a light to snap on somewhere above me. A voice, footsteps, anything. Seconds went by. Nothing came. Just my own pulse loud in my ears and the low hum of the air conditioning working behind the walls, indifferent to all of it. I flipped the headlamp on. The room bloomed red, and I understood all at once exactly what I'd stepped in. A glue trap. Not the cardboard kind you'd pick up at a hardware store for a mouse behind the refrigerator. Industrial. A long strip of it ran the length of the wall directly beneath the windows, wide enough that anyone climbing through and dropping straight down would land right in the middle of it. I had, with both feet, before I'd even had a chance to notice it. My abandoned shoe sat pressed into it, laces still tied. I knelt there a moment too long, trying to force it to make sense. Who ran a strip of industrial trap paper along an entire wall of windows? There was only one way off of it I could see. I bent forward and started working the laces on my remaining sneaker loose, moving slow, keeping my palms lifted away from anything past the edge of the strip. I'd have to leave both shoes behind. Or maybe I could peel the whole thing up on my way out. Deny whoever found this, a print or a fiber or anything that could put a name to what had happened here. I looked closer. I saw it was stapled down. Dozens of staples, little silver dashes catching the red light every few inches, driven straight through the paper and into the floorboards beneath it. Nobody stapled a glue trap to their hardwood floors. Not in their house. Nobody did that for mice. I was still working the second knot loose, half my mind still stuck on the staples when I heard him. Steps, not rushed, not quiet either. Steady, though, coming toward me out of the black rectangle I'd seen for a doorway. I twisted around, laces still tangled in my fingers, and a pair of legs was already standing directly over me. I twisted towards the movement but kept my eyes low. I never got the face. I got the can first. It was a menacing black and yellow aerosol can thrust down at me point blank and fired without a word. Then there was only pain, heat, chemical, and total, filling my eyes. It felt like they'd been doused in something already burning. Somewhere above the screaming and the alarms wailing in my skull, I heard the windows come down, one after another, fast. I was on the floor, clawing at my own face. I screamed for help without a single thought for whether I wanted the sound to bring the police down on me. I wanted the whole street to hear. A knee came down on my wrist, hard enough to grind it flat into the floorboards, and I made a sound I didn't recognize as mine. I fought it. It didn't matter. Whoever this was was built for this in a way that I wasn't. Or maybe I was just too blind and too far past reason to put up anything that counted as a fight. A cloth pressed down over my nose and mouth. He held it there with a patience that would have frightened me more than the pain if I could have put a thought together. It burned hot inside my nose and throat, and whatever it was, it was already working better than the spray had. I bucked against it as long as I could, and then the effort simply drained from me. My head went heavy first, then my limbs suddenly felt like they weren't attached to me. In seconds I fell into blackness and felt nothing. I woke up to the smell of my grandmother's attic. Mothballs. For a brief, blissful moment I was there, sifting through old-fashioned hats and clothes, playing dress-up with my sister. Then I opened my eyes. The pain there had mostly subsided, though I could feel a swelling making the skin of my face puffy and tender. For a while I didn't move, just lay there, letting my eyes do the work my body wasn't ready for yet. A low ceiling, bare bulbs strung along it at intervals, dim and yellowy. The air was cool and dry. Two sets of bunk beds against one wall, each bed made neatly with blue wool blankets. Metal shelving ran the length of the room across from them, packed floor to ceiling with cans, rows and rows of them, labels turned out. Two water tanks stood against the far wall, squat and industrial, with a bank of batteries wired up beside them. A bomb shelter. Somebody's serious, expensive bomb shelter. I tried to sit up, but something bit into both my ankles at once. I looked down, shackles, one on each leg, the kind of heavy iron cuffs I'd only ever seen in movies, connected by a short length of chain that ran off toward the wall behind me. I followed it with my eyes because some part of me needed to know where it ended, even though I already knew I wouldn't like the answer. Where it ended was a thick iron staple driven into the concrete floor and set in with a neat collar of fresh cement around the base. I looked up and around and understood where I was. A shower stall, tucked into the corner of the room, tile walls on three sides, the fourth side open to the room. He'd put me here like I was something that needed to be drained. I sat there a long moment, just breathing through it. And then I made myself look past the stall, past the chain, out of the rest of the room because there was nothing to be gained from staring at concrete. The far end of the space didn't match the rest at all. An oval rug sat centered under a reading lamp, warm light unlike the cold bulb over me. A worn easy chair beside it, angled just slightly toward an old wood stereo cabinet, the kind with a record player built into the top. It looked like a corner someone had built to sit in for hours. It looked, in spite of everything, almost cozy. I hated that I noticed that. Whoever had brought me here took care of things. An hour passed, maybe more. At some point I noticed my watch had been taken off while I was out. I'd tested the shackles, the only way I knew how, quietly, methodically, the way I tested locks. No give in the cuffs themselves, no given the chain. The staple in the floor didn't so much as shift under my weight, and I'd thrown my full weight against it more than once, braced with both hands until my skin was raw, and I understood I was only hurting myself for nothing. I stopped after that. There was a difference between fighting a lock that might open and fighting concrete that wouldn't. So I sat and I waited and I thought. I hadn't seen his face yet. Whatever else happened to me, I still had that going for me, and I intended to keep it that way as long as I could manage it. A man who'd never seen a face could say so, honestly, could say it with real conviction, the kind that might actually land. I'll go. I'll leave this neighborhood, this city, and you'll never see me again, because I couldn't pick you out of a lineup if my life depended on it. Anyone could have trapped me in this house. The real owner is probably on vacation, right? I ran the words over in my head, smoothing over so I wouldn't fumble it when I had my chance. I heard the door, a heavy sound. Metal dragging against metal, a latch or a bolt somewhere beyond the edge of the light. I turned my head away fast, toward the tile wall of the shower, and told myself I'd stay that way. He didn't speak. I could hear him in the room now. His footsteps were casual, moving across the room far from me, the scrape of something being shifted on a shelf, a soft click, then another. I kept my eyes on the tile and my ears on him. Then the record player started. A hiss first, the static of a needle finding a groove, and then voices, many voices at once layered over each other, rising and falling in a language I didn't understand. Something northern, I thought, cold sounding, all long vowels and soft consonants. The kind of language I associated with fjords and snow, though I couldn't have said why. Oral. Beautiful even in a way that had no business being down here. I sat with my back against the tile and listened to it fill the room. Some small, treacherous part of me was desperate to chance a look, but I didn't. I closed my eyes instead. The footsteps came closer, and I kept my face to the tile, eyes shut, and waited. I'm Arthur he said, almost pleasant, the kind of voice you'd expect from a man welcoming you into his home for dinner. What do you think of the shelter? He sounded genuinely interested, like a host asking whether I liked the renovations. I didn't answer. I kept my eyes closed. I kept my face to the wall. He didn't seem to need anything from me to keep going. Going on thirty years, he said, like I'd ask. Started building it in the nineties. Why two K? That was gonna be the one. Something softened in his voice. Then midnight came, lights stayed on, banks opened, everybody went to work. He talked on through the years, after that as though he were reading entries from a diary. Recessions, hurricanes, pandemics, civil unrest, one near miss after another. Arthur wasn't afraid of the end of the world. He'd spent thirty years waiting for it to justify his work. He stopped. Why won't you look at me? I made myself speak. My throat was dry. My voice came out smaller than I wanted. I haven't seen your face, I said. I won't. You let me go. I'll leave this place. I'll forget it. I'll forget the address. I'll forget the street. Forget your name. You'll never see me again. There was a pause, long enough that I thought maybe it had worked. Then he spoke. Leave this place. A wave of mortal fear passed through me. I was suddenly cold. He had no intention of releasing me, of turning me over to the police, not under any circumstances. He kept talking, undisturbed by my silence. When COVID hit, I was sure that was it, he said. His footsteps started moving away from me, unhurried, crossing back toward the far end of the room even as he talked. I watched the numbers climb every night. I felt something I hadn't felt in years. Hope, if I'm honest with you, real hope. He let out a breath, something close to a laugh, but not quite. Then 2021 came, the vaccines came, everyone just went back to their lives like nothing had happened. I gave up on it after that. Told myself I was a fool for holding on this long. I heard the creak of an easy chair taking his weight. And then, one night, last night, I saw you, he said, down the street, coming out of the Andersons place with a bag full of their things, like some slimy reverse Santa Claus. Something flipped in me right there. Thirty some years of work sitting down here going to waste. There you were, handing me a reason to use it. He laughed then, low and genuinely delighted. You have to admit there's something almost funny about how I got you. The paper on the floor, the spray. Another laugh, warmer this time. Rat traps and pest spray for an actual rat. I heard him stand. A can clicked softly against another on the shelf. It sounded like he was adjusting items on his shelves. Then he sat back down. Couldn't have planned it better. He went quiet for a moment, and I could feel him looking at the back of my head, satisfied with himself, waiting for me to appreciate the joke the way he did. I knew you'd see the windows open and come back eventually. Didn't have to wait long. He paused, letting me reflect on the sequence. And that brings us to now, he said. Me and my trapped brat. The record skipped. I heard him get up with an irritated sigh. A few careful movements somewhere in the room. The needle lifted. A moment later the music resumed from the same place. He sat back down. You can stare at the wall all you want, Arthur said. But it's a bit like a rocking chair, isn't it? A pause. I heard the easy chair creak as he stood. It might give you something to do, but it's not getting you anywhere. My dad used to say that. His footsteps crossed the room. The heavy door dragged open and then shut behind him. Something solid slid into place on the other side. Then nothing, no footsteps overhead, no sound at all, beyond the low hum of the water tanks and my own breathing. The lights went with him. I hadn't heard a switch, but the dim yellow bulbs overhead were gone. A single red security light near the door stayed on, throwing just enough light to turn the shelving into vague shapes and leave everything else to the dark. I sat there a long time. My throat had gone dry hours ago. It only got worse as the night wore on, thick and raw every time I swallowed. The shower head hung right above me. I could have reached up and turned it on without moving more than a few inches. I didn't. Something about it felt like giving him something else to laugh at. I was thirsty. I wasn't desperate yet, not desperate enough to lie soaking wet in the dark for God knew how long. At some point I fell asleep. I woke sore, my neck stiff from whatever angle I'd slumped into against the tile, my body aching in the dull, generalized way that told me I'd been out for hours rather than minutes. No sunlight reached down here to confirm it. Something had woken me. I sat and listened. Arthur in the room with me? I dismissed that almost immediately. I'd have heard the bolt slide back, the door dragging open, the same heavy sounds I'd catalogued the night before. None of them had come. Then I heard a voice. A voice muffled and distant, the kind of sound that had to pass through walls or floors or both to reach me at all. I couldn't make out the words, only the shape of speech rising and falling somewhere beyond the concrete. For one wild second I thought about screaming, throwing everything I had into it, hoping a sound might carry the same distance in reverse, hoping someone up there might hear a stranger's voice coming from underground and think to wonder why. I didn't. It could have been a television running. It could have been Arthur on the phone, some ordinary call about some ordinary thing, a man discussing grocery deliveries while I sat shackled somewhere beneath them, screaming into that uncertainty felt like a bet I couldn't afford to lose. But something mattered more than the voice itself. Wherever it had come from, it meant there was a gap somewhere. Maybe in the ductwork, maybe around a pipe. Maybe somewhere I'd never find. Somewhere, though, sound was getting through. A shout, if I timed it right, might save my life. It was the first real hope I'd felt since blundering into this nightmare of a house. But hope is a dangerous thing. It shows up whether you want it or not, and it always takes something from you when it's gone. If I only had one chance at signaling the outside world, I had to make it count. When the lights came back on, I'd have to open my eyes and find wherever that voice had come from. Which meant, eventually, I'd have to look at Arthur. A few minutes later, I heard the bolt slide back. The door dragged open. Morning, Arthur said. He sounded almost cheerful. You'll never guess who came to the door. I never get solicitors here. Never. But it was Mormons. Two of them. I heard him moving somewhere behind me, footsteps unhurried as usual. I was polite, let them run through their whole pitch. I took a brochure at the end, told them to have a nice day. Short laugh. They look so young, couldn't have been more than nineteen, either of them. Something fluttered through the air and landed on the shower stall floor beside me. Here, he said, some light reading for you. I didn't move. I'm tired of the blindfold act. Some of the cheer had left his voice. No food, no water, not until you pick your head up and look at me, like a man. I let a moment pass, long enough to make it look like a fight, before I opened my eyes. Some part of me had wanted this. Wherever that voice had come from earlier, I needed my eyes to find it, and Arthur had just handed me the excuse to open them. He was a big man, past sixty, broad through the shoulders in a way that didn't look earned in a gym, clean shaven with close cropped grey hair, a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the collar and tucked neatly into his jeans despite the heat still baking the world somewhere above us. He smiled at me. His eyes were a touch too far apart. I found myself struggling to meet his gaze. Hey there. He turned toward the door. I'll get you something to eat. Halfway there he stopped. You're not one of those people who pretends to be allergic to bread, are you? Don't answer that. The door dragged shut behind him. But this time he left the lights on. I looked around. Working the room I would have worked a house, methodical, cataloging everything I could see. The drain sat directly below me, dark and small between my feet. I dismissed it immediately. The voice had come from above, not below. The brochure lay a few inches from my knee, face up. A pair of handsome young people grinned out from the cover, arms extended toward the camera, like they were reaching through the paper itself. We're saved. What about you? I grimaced and looked away. The shower head above me was ordinary, sealed tight where it met the pipe. Nothing there for sound to travel through. The light fixtures overhead sat flush against the ceiling, no gaps, no seams. Then I saw it. A pipe, maybe the diameter of a baseball, disappeared into the wall just below the ceiling. A small metal grate covered the opening. Air exchange, probably. Something to keep the shelter breathing without anyone having to crack the door. It had to terminate outside somewhere, near the porch, maybe, if I was reading the layout right, close enough that the two missionaries standing at Arthur's front door might have caught the tail end of whatever drifted out of it. I could see how it worked. The grate slid sideways in a track meant to seal the opening completely. What good was an exhaust pipe if it let radiation pour in after the world ended? I found two more just like it, spaced along the walls at intervals. Every one of them sat closed, the grates slid flush across the openings. Every one, but this one. I stared at it for a moment longer, almost disbelieving. Arthur had built this place himself, alone, over thirty years, and something had slipped past him. Then I understood why. He could never have tested it. He couldn't stand down here and upstairs at the same time. He'd never had a reason to wonder whether an open vent carried sound because proving it would have required two people. He probably didn't even know. Why would he? The bolt slid back and the door dragged open. Arthur crossed the room toward me. A blackjack hung from his belt on a leather strap, swinging slightly with each step. I'd never been hit with one. I didn't need to have been to know what a single swing would do. He carried a plate, cold ravioli congealed at the edges, and two whole carrots laid beside it, like an afterthought. The smell reached me before he did. I didn't touch it. He watched my face while he set it down. Something in his expression made me think he was hoping for a complaint, something to give him a reason. I said nothing. He dropped a plastic water bottle beside me. If you need to relieve yourself, use the drain, he said, nodding toward it. That's what it's there for now. I didn't dignify it with response. I'd already decided, sometime during the long overnight hours, that I wasn't going to speak again unless I had no other choice. It was the only thing I still had to give or withhold. Don't bother trying to refill that water from the shower, he said, settling into the easy chair. I've shut the water off. He paused. Besides, you won't be here long enough to need a shower anyway. I wanted to ask what that meant so badly it physically hurt to hold the question in my throat. I didn't. Some part of me already knew. He sat and watched me drink quiet for a while. You want to know, don't you? He said eventually. Not really a question, but how I'm going to do it. I mean I said nothing. I felt something in my chest go cold. Well, after all these years waiting for the collapse, this place has never really been put to the test, he said, smiling faintly. I want to know if it's really airtight. My mind went straight to the vent, the little grate, the pipe. Pneumatics, I believe it's called, gas exchange. I've done some reading on it. He said it in a way another man might mention an obscure hobby, almost embarrassed by it. It's impossible for me to fill the whole atmosphere outside with gas just to see if this place keeps it out. So I figure the next best thing is to see if the shelter can keep gas in. The horror of it settled over me all at once. He meant to gasp me, seal me in here, and fill the room until there was nothing left to breathe but poison. I'm not ready just yet, he said, rising from his chair. But soon. He paused at the door. Enjoy the pasta. The door dragged shut behind him. The lights went with him. I sat in the dark and let it take me for a while. My death felt certain now. No longer a possibility hovering at the edge of things. Just a question of when. I turned that word over for what felt like an hour. When? Tonight. Tomorrow. At some hour I couldn't guess at, arriving only on a schedule Arthur controlled. Would the lights be out when it happened? Would I even see it coming? I didn't know which answer I wanted. Dying in the dark seemed worse somehow, more alone, nothing left to look at but black. Then again, maybe the dark would be a mercy. One less thing to witness on the way out. I made myself stop. I had one thing working in my favor, one thin advantage Arthur didn't know he'd handed me. Spiraling in the dark wasn't going to make use of it. I sat there and I saw my sister's face in that dark. I knew that if this was the end for me, she'd never know how it happened. The money wouldn't arrive next month. She would panic. Bills would pile up. Eventually the specialist would stop seeing my nephew. I needed to listen. A voice from outside, however faint, was the only chance I had of putting a sound of my own through that vent before it was too late to matter. So I listened. Underneath that, I found myself listening for something else, too. Arthur. The sound of him moving overhead, a tank being dragged across the floor, a hose unspooling, anything that might tell me he'd started. I didn't know what any of it would actually sound like. I had no reference for the specific noise a man made preparing to kill someone with gas. I listened for it anyway. I started awake from a doze I hadn't meant to fall into. No way to know how long I'd been under. A thudding reached me first, rhythmic, heavy, drawing closer with each beat. Then the bolt slid back and the door dragged open. The lights slammed on all at once, brutal after so long in the dark. Arthur came in backward, hauling a dolly behind him. He turned it, and I saw what was strapped to it. A metal tank. Heavy, about the size of a beer keg. My stomach dropped. I knew by looking at the sheer size of the thing that the puny, forgotten vent above my head wouldn't be enough to save me. Almost there, he said, sounding almost giddy. He wrestled the tank off the dolly with a grunt, setting it down carefully. I just need to get all this food out of here first. I watched him begin to clear the shelves. He loaded cans into crates, stacked the crates onto the dolly, and wheeled load after load out through the door and up whatever stairs led out of this place. Each trip left the room barer, something in me emptied along with it. He left the door open between trips. I don't know if he did it on purpose, or simply didn't think about it. But either way, it was its own kind of torture, that rectangle of light and open air sitting there while I sat chained to a shower. I thought about pleading with him, reasoning, finding some argument that might reach whatever was left of a normal man underneath all of this. I abandoned the idea almost immediately. Arthur wasn't confused. He wasn't cruel by accident. He believed in what he was doing all the way down. I remembered something my high school history teacher had said once about men exactly like him. There's nothing more dangerous and nothing more unstoppable than a misguided person who truly believes in what they're doing. The shelves were empty. Arthur came back one final time and knelt beside the tank, working some kind of panel on the side, pressing buttons in a sequence he already knew by heart. A timer, maybe? Something to give him a head start before whatever was inside filled the room. He stood and looked at me. Well, this is it, he said. I've been so busy I didn't think to prepare anything to say. He smiled. Maybe it's better if you get the last word. You've been so quiet. I looked back at him. I didn't say a word. He shrugged. Suit yourself. He paused at the door, one hand on the frame, and looked back at me. You want this open or closed? He laughed at his own joke, short and ugly, and slammed it shut behind him. A second later, the lights went out. Right away, my heart started slamming harder with every second that passed. I could actually feel it moving in my chest. I had no idea how long it would take, no idea if the gas would come slow or all at once, whether I'd have minutes or seconds once it started. The event wasn't going to be enough. Too small. Too far. Still, it was the only thing I had. I forced myself to slow my breathing down and listen as hard as I'd ever listened to anything. Nothing. Then I heard something. For one terrible second, something in my chest lifted, thinking it might be a voice again, my chance finally arriving. I strained toward it. The hope collapsed the moment I placed the sound. It wasn't coming from above me. It was coming from the tank. The ticking, not sharp, not mechanical, nothing like a clock or a bomb in a movie. Softer than that, almost gentle. The same tick a steam radiator makes when it's warming up. I understood what it meant well enough. The tank was either getting ready or already working, and either way, the countdown I couldn't see had already started. I sat with that ticking for a while, terror giving way slowly to something flatter and more exhausted. I had heard once that people on planes going down were better off making peace with it, letting go, instead of spending their last minutes clawing at something they couldn't change. I tried. I actually tried. Sitting there listening to that soft, patient ticking, I found I couldn't do it, not even close. There was no peace anywhere in me. Only the ticking, the dark, and the seconds running out. I almost didn't believe it when I heard it. It was a voice, muffled and distant, drifting down through the vent the same way it had before. Two voices this time, maybe more, overlapping, too far off to make out any words. I didn't hesitate. I screamed. I roared until my chest burned, until the sound tearing out of me stopped sounding anything like a human. I didn't stop. I couldn't have stopped if I wanted to. Every ounce of breath I had going into that one narrow pipe above me. When I ran out of air, I paused, gasping, and in that silence I heard the voices again, louder this time, agitated, closer than they'd seemed before. I gulped down another breath to scream again, but before I could, I heard the tank. Louder now, much louder. The ticking wasn't soft anymore. It climbed steadily in pitch, until it reminded me of active sonar, each pulse pinging into the dark in search of something. I threw my head back and screamed at the vent until my throat went raw, until the sound coming out of me turned wet and broken, tears running down my face. Just as the noise from the tank threatened to drive me over the edge, I heard the bolt slide back. Shouts followed, more than one voice now, and then a beam of light swept across the room, harsh and white after so long in the dark. This is the police! Is anyone here? Here, I screamed. I'm here.

Epilogue

SPEAKER_01 53:57

I told all of that to two detectives in a room that smelled like burned coffee, wrapped in one of those thin foil blankets they give to people in shock. My hands wouldn't stop shaking long enough to hold the water they'd given me, so it just sat there on the table. They already knew most of it before I opened my mouth. That was the part that took the longest to accept. The police hadn't come to the house looking for me. Not at first. They'd been sweeping the neighborhood after the Andersons reported their place hit two nights earlier, going door to door, talking to whoever answered. Somewhere along the way, a resident had called in an unfamiliar car that had been parked outside for two days straight. Mine. Apparently, it had already been flagged from an eyewitness report after a job I'd done weeks before. Arthur's house had simply been the next stop. They told me they'd been standing on the porch making small talk with him, asking the same routine questions they'd asked every other neighbor when they heard it, screaming, muffled, coming from somewhere beneath the house. Arthur, they said, had gone very still. I asked how long they'd been there before they heard me. Three or four minutes, the detective said. Long enough that we almost moved on to the next house. I didn't ask anything after that. There wasn't anything else worth asking. A few more minutes. Visiting the neighbor next instead of Arthur. A slower morning. That would have been it. I gave them everything I had. There wasn't a version of this where I walked out of that room with anything left to protect. And some tired part of me was almost relieved to stop protecting it. When the detective finished writing, he looked up. Thank you, he said. This was a decent way to go about it. I thought about that word again, sitting there under the foil blanket with my hands shaking too hard to lift a paper cup. Decent. I'd told myself that word so many times over the last few years, it had nearly stopped meaning anything. Maybe I could be one of the good ones now. Not the way I'd meant it before, standing on strangers' lawns in the dark, telling myself stories about debts and Robin Hood and a sister who never asked questions. This time, I told the truth.

Channel Outro

SPEAKER_00 56:39

Thanks for listening to Tonight's Terror. If you enjoyed the story, follow, rate, and review on your favorite podcast platform. It helps new listeners find the show. Visit tonight's terror.com for all our stories, merch, and more. Until next time, sleep well.