This piece started with a gag. Well, two of them, actually -- it does really start out:

Though I know the original takes place in London, rather than Massachusetts. The other gag's the last line, and yeah I know, one should leave the gag for the very end of the story, rather than middle.

Anyway, as you'll gather from this snippet the two guys are in the middle of something that may involve nasty evil creatures or sick and twisted people. That's never resolved by the end of the story, and I'm not sure myself which way it goes. The story's littered with clues that could go either way.

Our two characters here are Dennis, who's a civil engineer and very much a realist, and Michael, who's a salesman andfan of the occult. They're stranded together in the wilds of Massachusetts (yay, Lovecraft country!) by a wild summer storm. The phones are out, their cells don't work for some reason, there are trees down all over, and Dennis' car has been trashed. They spend the night together (no, not like that you pervs. That comes later) at a ramshackle motel, and segue into a horror movie. To their credit they're both aware that they're potentially in one, and since the plot of most horror movies can be summed up as "smart people do stupid things and get killed" they try hard to not be stupid, even when they each think the other's nuts about the true cause of what's going on.

Shared danger has heightened the attraction they feel for each other, and assuming they make it out alive they're going to be together for a very long time, which is cool. (And a big assumption, but that's part of the fun)

In the chapter immediately before this one, Michael's stumbled across the body of a shopkeeper they'd met earlier. The body was pretty badly torn up, but when checked out later it was gone. They're holed up in a room in one of the old houses in town hiding out. They'd slept together and had some reasonably wild "we're gonna die soon" sex, and this chapter starts out trying to deal with what they've seen so far and how they're going to deal with it. (They do decide to assume the other could be very right, which is what'll get them out of the whole predicament alive, but I felt like ending this bit where I did for the fun of the punchline. Bad author, no cookie for me! )

It was a dark and stormy night

"You didn't see it," Michael said, throwing his hands up. His voice had a warbly edge to it, like he was on the edge of hysterics, his eyes wide and wild with the fear the memory brought with it. "He was dead, Dennis! I saw him." Michael shuddered. "Slumped over the counter. There was blood everywhere. The smell, the slime