where darkness waited.
“Why’re you doing it?”
“The usual, on a bet,” he said. “You?”
“Same,” she answered. She cleared her throat and pointed the flashlight at the floor. “So you think it’s bull, all that talk about people coming in and not getting out of here?” Now the flashlight was on his shoes.
“I thought I might find out,” he said, casting his light toward the right, to what could have been a living room. “But it’s obviously true that the front door won’t stay locked or how else could we…what the--” He stopped mid-sentence. There was an adult-sized shape sitting on what looked like a piano bench in the adjoining room. At least, it had the shape of a piano—everything was covered in big canvas sheets.
“What! What!” Suddenly the strange girl was at his side, her circle of light careening around the living room until it also landed on the tall lump on the piano bench.
“It’s not moving,” James observed.
“No,” she agreed in a low voice.
Neither of them moved, either.
Then she said, “I still wanna know what it is, don’t you?”
And to his shock, she edged toward the living room, so he did too.
“Listen, I don’t know if we should touch anything,” he warned, but she had already grasped the canvas sheet and jerked as she ran in the opposite direction. After they finished coughing and rubbing their eyes from the dust, they both panned their flashlights on what was definitely a piano and then each took a step back as they saw what was on the bench.
A skinny, balding man in a tuxedo sat at the piano, his fingers on the keys, his feet on the pedals. James just stared