BEEP! A Modern Domestic Horror By Spence Hixon
Beep!
A Modern Domestic Horror
BEEP!
My eyes fluttered open to darkness. Darkness and silence. Something had pulled me out of a dream with a very cute girl and I was not happy about it. I checked the alarm on my phone. It hadn’t gone off. It was only 4 a.m.–too early to get up. This was the weekend. It’s a federal crime to wake up before sunrise on the weekend. Sleep gradually lowered my eyelids.
The dream was still there. Dream Girl was in a light floral dress as we ran—
BEEP!
Like Thanos’ snap, any hope I had of returning to that dream blew away in so much sand. I knew I heard it. It wasn’t like any ordinary electronic beep. This one was high-pitched, designed to create an automatic fight or flight response out of anyone who heard it.
Maybe it’s over.
I waited in silence. One minute passed. Five minutes passed. I rolled over to see if I could find that Dream Girl again.
BEEP!
Oh God. It’s the blasted smoke detector. I’ll have to change the battery in the morning.
All I had to do to fall back asleep was ignore it. It was a battle of wills. Man versus machine. John Henry versus—
BEEP!
Maybe it’s like a T-rex. If I don’t move, it won’t see me.
I held as still Medusa’s ex in the hopes that it would give up. I even held my breath.
BEEP!
Gasp!
In my sleep-addled brain, I figured that I might fall asleep if I counted the seconds between beeps, like sheep over a fence.
BEEP!
15 seconds passed.
BEEP!
That wasn’t 15 seconds. Only 13 seconds had passed this time. BEEP! That was 18. Then it stopped. 30, 40 seconds passed. 1 minute, 2 minutes. I smiled and closed my eyes.
BEEP! That was—
“FINE! I’m up!” I ran my hand over my face and felt my bones settle painfully into place when I sat on the edge of the bed.
Pants, shirt, slippers. The moment I got up, Robin, my geriatric bratwurst of a corgi, decided that I needed an escort to the door, which meant stepping in front of me and waiting for me to trip. Which I did. Luckily, I caught myself on the dresser. His arthritis was bad enough that it always took him a few tries to get moving. If it wasn’t for the baby gate keeping him in the room at night, he’d usually decide that the walk to wake me up so he could drain his bladder was not worth the pain and ended up peeing all over the house.
I remembered the baby gate a little too late and stumbled right into it. This time, the floor caught my fall.
“Mother—”
BEEP!
“I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN!” It thankfully took only a few seconds to reassemble the gate and jimmy it back into position. “There.”
It was now my job to stand in the middle of the hallway, one ear cocked towards the ceiling as I listened for the next beep. It was one of those quasi-ethereal sounds that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, which made finding the source a challenge.
It went off again. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was coming form the family room, so I went there and listened. That was the pattern: beep, move, wait. It must have taken ten minutes to pinpoint the culprit.
I glared up at the smoke detector right outside my bedroom and its little flashing red light. “A ventriloquist, huh? Have me searching all over the house...” Now, I am tall, tall enough to reach the ceiling, so I had no problem pushing the red button.
Just a tip, but that button is not for turning the thing off. It’s to test it.
When the demonic device went off even louder, I recoiled like I’d touched a snake. “Of course, the battery…”
I rose to the balls of my feet and reached up with both hands. The battery compartment on those things can be a bit tricky. It’s on the side and you have to push it first to make it open—slightly. Then you have to wiggle the little compartment while pulling until it actually pivots open enough for you to think you can take out the battery inside. Of course, this was more than I could manage on my toes. Such intricate work was a lot harder than poking a button.
With a grumble, I headed to the kitchen on the other side of the house, grabbed a pack of fresh AAs, and dragged a chair back with me. It wobbled as I tried to balance on it with sleep still on my mind. Even with the extra height, it still took a minute to get the battery compartment open.
“A 9-volt!? Who the—"
BEEP!
Another trip to the kitchen. I spent a good 5 minutes rummaging around the junk drawer before I procured the last 9-volt in the house. Back on the chair. I stretched and strained to get the dead battery out of its little prison. The detector decided to remind me of its hunger just before I robbed it of its life source, then replaced it with the new battery. I celebrated a job well-done with a loud sigh of relief and headed back to the respite of my pillow. The chair would have to wait until morning to make its trek home. With a smile, I closed my eyes.
BEEP!
I opened my eyes.
“Ugh. Stupid junk drawer battery why did I even grab the thing never getting back to sleep at this rate…” Every movement I made was marked by reluctance and ire, like a teenager asked to do a simple thing for one of their parents. BACK to the kitchen I went, tossing the old dead battery into the trash on my way to the back door. I kept the unopened batteries in a box in the garage. The cold garage.
After a brief pep talk, I hurried out to the ice box in my pajamas and grabbed the entire pack of batteries. Creak. I looked back at the house. The screen door was slowly creeping closed. It was the kind with a lock. “Oh no!” I ran to it and slammed my fingers into the handle just as it latched close. “Holy—!”
BEEP!
It was laughing at me.
Out of instinct, I patted my pockets but they were empty. “Ugh!” My spare key sat beneath a fake rock just outside the house. When I opened the garage door, I could have sworn I saw a yeti outside. It wasn’t just cold, it was arctic. Freezing would have been an improvement. Another pep talk and I braved the tundra, grabbed the rock, and rushed back into the garage.
God bless central heating.
I could barely feel my feet when I returned to the chair and replaced the “new” battery with a 9-volt guaranteed to be fresh and good, straight from the unopened package.
I waited. I counted to 10.
“Finally.”
My Dream Girl beckoned me. I had one leg over the baby gate to my room when
BEEP!
“Oh, for crying out loud!”
I wasn’t being careful now.
Having gone from lethargic teenager to temperamental toddler, I stomped back up the chair and pulled the battery compartment open. It’s hard staying in a blinding rage when the violent action you are depending on for catharsis requires calm, precise motions. But in the end, the smoke detector gave up the ghost and I left it with no battery. No battery, no power, no beep.
I had won.
In the morning I would need to deal with it, but that was… a good hour away. “It’s already 5?” There’s nothing like tucking into a warm bed, laying your head on the pillow, and closing your eyes.
BEEP!
I opened my bloodshot eyes.
I didn’t get it. I slew the beast and took out its beating heart! Out of bed, over the baby gate, onto the chair. This time, I poked and prodded and hit and cursed (not as in swearing, but an actual fairy-tale curse that would haunt its descendants for generations). It twisted. I put my hand over the entire thing and turned. It easily unscrewed from its mounting and fell into my hand.
It comes off?! “Dear Energizer Bunny in the sky, please give me strength.”
I could have avoided all of that if I’d just noticed the arrows on the darn thing.
But when I pulled it down, the demented disk resisted.
“What the—”
Wires ran from the back of the device into the ceiling. Out of all the smoke detectors in the entire house, this was the only one that was hardwired into the house. And for what? Why did it need so many power sources?
To remove the wires I had to get on tip-toe on top of the rickety chair while angling the thing down to get a better look. It was connected using some sort of clip. I squeezed it. Flicked it. Rocked it. Pulled it. The diabolical detector taunted me with more incessant beeping.
The time for gentleness was over. I scrabbled at it like a frenzied squirrel until it somehow fell into my hand. Then I checked it for more batteries, even prying the thing open to do so (which it strictly forbade me from doing). Nothing.
There was no physical, scientific way that it could get power. Now that I held its lifeless husk in my hands, it almost looked cute in a pitiful way. I snapped it together and gently lay the corpse down on the chair. Once more, I climbed into bed and finally, for what was surely the last time that night, closed my eyes.
BEEP!
“HOLY BUTTERED BISCUITS! You evil, undead car alarm!” Yes, those were the actual words I used; they aren’t some family-friendly replacement. More colorful phrases, however, did follow as I stormed out of bed and plowed right through the baby gate, startling poor Robin awake. The only thing I could really think of was getting back to sleep, and this, this nasty thing was preventing that.
Without breaking my stride, I took the smoke detector in hand and headed for the front door. My hands worked in a blur unlocking it. As soon as the door was opened, my tormentor went on the only flight of its plastic nonlife and landed in the flower bed. “Good riddance!” I shouted after it and slammed the front door shut.
Now there was nothing preventing me from going back to sleep.
My Dream Girl was sill there. She wore—
BEEP!
No, not this time. It’s outside. It can’t hurt me now. I shut my eyes even tighter.
BEEP!
I curled into a ball and tried to focus on something, anything. I thought back on that one time I was with my ex girlfriend—
BEEP!
—WHEN she bought that special outfit just for me to enjoy, the one that showed off—
BEEP!
—that showed off—
BEEP!
I put the pillow over my head. But it did no good. With the next muffled BEEP! I sat bolt upright in bed like a man possessed. A sense of purpose gave me focus, and with that focus came a sort of serenity. I slipped on my loafers, got out of bed, threw on a long-sleeved shirt and jacket, and headed to the garage. The cold didn’t bother me now; I was on a mission.
The shovel hung in its proper place on the wall, until I had it in hand that is. The garage door slowly opened. At least this time, finding the detector was easy. It sat in plain sight on the mulch. I swear it looked up at me with its little red light to beg for mercy.
SLAM!
BEEP.
SLAM!
Beeeeeeep…
SLAM!
BeeEeeEeEep it warbled.
Each deadly strike of the shovel hit its mark and in seconds I had silenced the monster for good. It was now cracked, dented, and surrounded by little bits of its own hard shell. Then I dug into the frozen ground. An unceremonious kick sent my foe to its final resting place. Within 5 minutes, everything looked like an unassuming flower bed again, not a shallow grave.
As i walked back into the house, I noticed the neighbor across the street staring at me. She was always an early riser.
“Morning.”
She didn’t even nod in response, but kept her eyes on me until the garage door was between us.
Once I got inside, I jumped into the shower for a quick rinse. Then I crawled back under the sweet, though no longer warm, covers of my bed and drifted off to sleep.
Dream Girl had been waiting for me. She was giving me that “come hither” look, so my dream-self came thither. Leaning in close, she brought her lips to my ear and whispered,
BeEeEEeeEEeeeEP!
My eyes flew open. There, on the pillow next to me, sat the dirty, shattered remains of the detector, its flickering, red vulture-eye staring at me.
It beeped.
Robin howled.
I screamed.
