Apparition, page 12
Still, he knew he wasn’t going to drink tonight. Not out of a desire to better follow the church’s recommendations but because he knew if he started drinking tonight, he probably wouldn’t stop. So that was out. He was a parent – an only parent, a single parent – and drinking himself into oblivion wasn’t an option.
Something thudded above him. Footsteps.
“Matthew!” he hollered. “Bed!” Ella was by far the more difficult of the kids for him to understand or relate to, but at least she went to bed easily – as often as not going to sleep on her own, as she had tonight. Not Matthew, who would find any excuse to remain awake, from imaginary monsters under his bed to a bladder that had to be both the size of a pea and plagued with severe incontinence to judge by the number of times he went to the bathroom each night.
The footsteps stopped. Shane returned to his puttering, and he figured that Matthew – caught and chagrined – must have crept back into his room. But only a moment later, the footsteps started up again. Heavier this time; it almost sounded like his son was running around up there. Stomping around, in fact; the footsteps were no longer the light noise they had been but were a deep, bass thudding. Shane wondered what his son was doing up there.
“Matthew!” he called, and tried to inject as much warning of dire things to come as he could into his voice. Death, dismemberment, and a complete moratorium on cartoons were all implied in the single word.
The footsteps continued.
Shane sighed and put a hand over his eyes. He was tired. The kids had both held up well, considering what they had seen, what had happened to their mother. He was often surprised how well they handled it. Indeed, if the worst things he had to deal with were a slightly surly teenage girl and a kid with a urinary obsession, he should count himself lucky. But he wasn’t feeling lucky at the moment. Dark anger boiled up in him, black and thick as tar. He had a moment where he wished he was the spanking kind of parent.
Geez, get a grip, he thought, and pushed the anger back. That wasn’t like him. He must be more tired than he thought.
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud.
The anger tried to boil up again as the footsteps continued – what was Matthew doing up there, holding a single-man sack race? – but he forced it back down and took a few deep breaths before standing up and walking with measured pace to the stairs.
He could still hear the footsteps as he ascended, thud-stomp-crashing around.
“Matthew,” he called, trying to pitch his voice at an impossible spot between a shout and a whisper, “if you wake up Ella, I’ll….”
His voice drifted off as he stepped into the hall. The footsteps had stopped abruptly. The door at the other end of the hall – his bedroom door – slammed shut.
The hall was dark. The light off. He fumbled for the switch but couldn’t find it in the blackness.
“Matthew,” he said in a low voice. He started toward the door to his room, as much curious now as annoyed. “What are you doing in my –”
His words stopped as abruptly as a car running into a bridge abutment. He was standing between the kids’ rooms. Ella’s on one side, Matthew’s on the other. Matthew’s door was still open.
And Matthew was asleep in his bed.
Shane wondered for a moment if his sometimes impish son was playing a joke on him. But he knew immediately that wasn’t happening. Matthew might be capable of playing a joke, but there was no force on heaven or earth that could get him to lay as still as he was unless he was truly and deeply asleep.
What’s going on here?
His nerves started jangling like a bank of telephones waiting to be answered. He stepped to the side and pushed open Ella’s door.
She was asleep, too. He could make her out in the dim moonlight that filtered into the room. She moaned and rolled over. The moan sent shivers through his bones. She sounded like she was dying.
Don’t be stupid.
He went back into the hall, closing the door behind him. This time he groped around for the light switch until he found it. Flicked it up.
Click.
Nothing. The hall remained dark.
Shane stood there quietly, his nerves no longer jangling but feeling like someone had flayed their ends and left them raw and screaming.
What was going on?
He felt himself moving toward his room. Stood in front of the closed door, and before he could think twice he threw the door open. It slammed against the wall of his bedroom, hard enough that he wondered if the knob had punched a hole in the drywall. But that didn’t concern him nearly as much as what he might find in here.
He looked around. Bed. Bureau. Small desk.
Boxes cluttered the space. Half-unpacked clothing lay around. But there was literally nowhere to hide. Not for anything larger than a cat.
He glanced to the side, and saw the closet. The French style doors hung open, the closet clearly empty.
The master bathroom hung off the back of his room like an unwanted appendage. It was the only place left to look. The door was shut.
Moving slower now, Shane edged toward the bathroom door. A quiet voice in the back of his mind whispered that he was acting stupidly; that he was going blindly into what could be a very bad situation. A much louder voice told that part of his mind to shut up. What was he going to do, call the police to report a case of footsteps?
He edged toward the bathroom door. The doorknob reflected dull glints of light. He reached for it.
Slam!
Shane jerked around and saw that his bedroom door was now shut. Something had closed it.
Thud-thud-thud-thud….
Footsteps again.
Shane rushed to the bedroom door. He threw it open and ran into the hallway. Everything was still dark.
The footsteps stopped at the same instant he set foot into the hall.
He looked around, confused. The darkness seemed to be somehow thicker now, a pool that was expanding through the hall, pressing on him, pushing into him.
Fear started gnawing at Shane, tearing at the back of his thoughts like a coyote worrying the carcass of a fresh kill.
A new sound came to him. He couldn’t figure out what it was at first. The sound of his own blood pulsing through his head sounded like muted thunder in his ears, and the other noise was just barely loud enough to be heard above it.
Shane stepped further into the hall. The noise was low and slithering, a snakelike hissing in the black void around him. He followed it, step by step through the hall. When he drew even with the kids’ rooms again he heard it grow louder and turned to enter his son’s room.
The bedroom seemed darker than it had only moments before. No moonlight found its way into the room, and Matthew was just a slightly rounded bulge in the inky area of his bed. Fingers of darker shadow clutched at the window pane, and Shane thought for a moment that there was something out there, something dangerous and only half-seen.
Just the trees. Just trees, city boy.
The sound came again. Whispering. He realized it was coming not just from his son’s room, but from his boy’s bed.
He tried to quiet his mind, to quell the growing sense of panic that threatened to overcome him. But his heart was speeding up, heading toward a fatal velocity. He felt like he had plummeted off a cliff and was free-falling into a dark chasm where the monsters of the heart were born.
He moved to his son’s bed. The darkness, already palpable, now seemed not only to have substance, but emotion. If darkness could hate, then that was happening now. He was pushing against an unseen force. Real, but invisible. Full of rage.
The whispering was steady now, a one-sided conversation. But with whom? Or what? Chills spiked Shane’s arms into gooseflesh.
He was next to his son’s bed now, and the whispering was still coming in a steady flow. He couldn’t make out the words. He leaned in closer.
Matthew’s face, he saw, was covered by blankets. The sight was somehow worse than the angry darkness, worse than the sounds he had heard. It looked almost like someone had wrapped his son’s tiny head in a cocoon of bedding. A body with no head.
Carefully, slowly, Shane unraveled the blanket from around his son. As he did, the whispering grew louder. Finally, he pulled off the last fold, exposing his son’s face.
Matthew was talking now, no longer just whispering. His face was strange – slack, though not as though he were merely asleep. No, it seemed almost like he was drugged. Vacant.
“No,” the little boy said, and his high sing-song voice – the voice that usually thrilled Shane with love and happiness – was strained and warbling. “No, he’s my daddy.” Shane shuddered. Who was Matthew talking to in his dreams? “Yes,” Matthew continued. “Yes, he’s nice.” There was a pause, and the boy’s head tilted slightly, as though listening for a quiet voice. “No,” he said, and his slack face grew suddenly tight. “No, none of us are dead yet.”
Shane had been listening quietly to this point, any sense that he should wake his boy fled in the face of a burning desire – a desire whose genesis he could not pinpoint – to know. Now, however, he didn’t want to know anything, didn’t want to hear a single word more from his sleeping son’s lips.
He shook Matthew. Lightly at first, then harder.
“Matthew,” he whispered urgently. His son’s face remained slack. Shane shook him even harder. “Matthew!”
A sound shredded the sudden stillness, an electronic drone followed by a tinny siren that made Shane jump where he stood. He spun around to face the sound, his entire body tensing. Remembering another night in a child’s room, a night when a silver edge had caught the moonlight, when blood had splashed the walls of his home.
He relaxed slightly when he saw that it was one of his son’s toys, a robot that had turned on and was cruising across the floor. Shane grabbed the gadget. At first he thought that the toy must be one of those interactive novelties that activated when someone walked across its path. Then he realized that couldn’t be the case: if it were such a toy, then it would have activated when he walked through the room, not when he was standing still beside his son’s bed.
He flipped the shrieking toy around in his hands, trying vainly in the dark to find an off switch. He finally did, but before he touched it the robot went silent again.
Shane put the toy down where it had been a moment ago. He watched it, more than half certain it would go on again, but it remained still. Silent. A dead thing of plastic and circuitry.
Finally, convinced it was not going to move again, Shane turned away from the robot.
And almost screamed as he came face to face with his son.
Matthew was sitting up, staring directly at his father.
“Geez, Matthew, what are you…. Matthew?”
The boy’s eyes were open wide, the whites almost glowing in the coiled darkness of the room. In spite of this, however, Shane didn’t feel like his son was really looking at him. His gaze was somehow beyond Shane, as though Matthew were looking past the confines of the room and into a faraway world that only he could see.
Fear ran on rodent feet up and down Shane’s spine. He had seen that look before.
(Kari, blinking rapidly, looking beyond the bedroom, whispering “My children my children my children my children,” and rocking back and forth as though singing a lullaby…)
“Matthew?” Shane said again.
His son’s gaze remained the same for a moment, then the boy’s eyes closed and opened slowly. He focused on Shane, but there was still a strangely dreamy – even drugged – aspect to his son’s gaze.
“We aren’t dead yet, are we?” said Matthew.
Shane couldn’t tell from his son’s voice if he had asked the question fearing an affirmative response… or hoping for it. He shuddered.
Matthew’s eyes closed. He breathed deeply. He sounded for all the world like he was sound asleep, though Shane had never heard of someone sleeping while sitting up ramrod straight in their bed.
More to feel like he was doing something than because he thought it would help, Shane put his hands on Matthew’s shoulders, and slowly pressed his son back into a horizontal position. Matthew seemed to resist at first, as though determined for some reason to remain upright and alert though deep in a black land of strange death-dreams. Then he went limp, and Shane almost fell onto the bed himself as his son collapsed under his hands.
Shane straightened up and looked at Matthew. Thoughts of the sounds that had brought him up here in the first place had been driven out of his mind, replaced by worry. He had never seen his son act like this. Never seen anything like it, for that matter.
The thought struck him that his wife had gone insane. That was the only possible rationale for what had happened that night. And weren’t some forms of insanity genetic? What if Matthew was starting to exhibit strange behavior that would ultimately result in him attacking his family, then slitting his own wrists and legs so he could bleed to death in a bathroom?
No, that’s ridiculous. He had a dream. Just a dream.
But what about Kari? What about Matthew’s mother? She went crazy.
And what about the sounds you heard?
Maybe you’re the one who’s crazy.
That last thought shook him as much as anything had this night: the thought that perhaps he was mad, that all this was imagination. Had he ever really married? Did his wife go insane one night, or was it just a story told by one side of a mind shattered by psychosis and believed by the rest of the damaged cerebrum?
No. This isn’t a dream.
It was too real. The feel of cool air on his skin, the slightest traces of breeze tickling the hair on his arm. The boxes and half-unpacked toys and clothing scattered about in a way that had no pattern and yet was somehow distinctly the work of his son.
His son. Matthew was real. There was no way he wasn’t. Not even the sickest heart could mimic the love Shane had for his children.
No, this was all real. And, being real, was just that much more confusing. Madness is, at heart, the easiest state in which to find oneself, for it absolves a person from any responsibility or sense of accountability. Reality, though… reality demands attention, demands reason and thought and heartbreak.
Shane never could have dreamed what had happened to his family in a simple fever-dream born of madness. Only real life could have presented him with something so cruel and so achingly permanent in its effect.
Matthew snored. Shane looked down at him and saw that his son was sleeping normally now. No whispers, no slack-faced expression hiding behind his slumber. Just deep breaths and peace.
Shane watched him for a few minutes, losing himself in the deep breathing and relaxed posture of his son. Taking comfort from the face that was at once so much a mix of his parents and at the same time so completely his own.
He kissed Matthew’s forehead. Matthew smiled and, still sleeping, reached up and briefly encircled Shane’s neck with his arms. A hug that was so light and quick he almost didn’t feel it.
But he did feel it. He felt it, and felt the love that it represented.
He left the room slowly, feet stepping carefully between the boxes and toys and heaps of junk that a little boy could accumulate and treasure in a way that no grownup would remember or comprehend. He looked back when he got to the doorway, glancing one more time at Matthew.
Again, the darkness was so complete that he almost couldn’t see his son. Just a dark patch in a black sea. For a moment he was tempted to go back to his boy, to get in bed with him and hold him in his arms all night long.
But he didn’t. He turned away, and closed the door partway.
Once in the hall, he reached for the nearby light switch and flicked it again. Though it hadn’t worked just a few minutes ago, now the hall light came on instantly, suffusing the corridor with a faint yellow glow that didn’t banish the shadows so much as push them into corners where they would huddle and wait for their turn to emerge once again.
***
Behind him, in Matthew’s room, the boy snored again, then twitched and rolled over as though someone had tried to wake him before he was ready to get up.
Matthew pulled the covers up to his chin and, even in sleep, held tight to them.
