13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors (6 page)

“
The world broke him,” the older
girl had said. “Someday, he’s gonna kill someone. And there ain’t a
damn thing any of us can do about it.”

But Marisol had done something. She’d woken
the boy up at dawn by tapping softly on the window by his bunk bed.
They’d canoed out into the lake, and, under a sapphire blue sky,
she smacked him over the head with a paddle. The early-morning sun
had glinted off the blood flowing down his face. He’d led out a
single cry just before she whacked him again with the paddle,
knocking him into the water.

The most disturbing piece of this flood of
memories wasn’t the horrors she’d witnessed summer after summer,
but her own calm and calculated response to what she’d done. She’d
paddled back to shore, cried a few crocodile tears, and told a
counselor the boy had fallen in.

“
We weren’t wearing lifejackets,”
she recalled saying. “He sank so fast. There was nothing I could
do.”

And, at last, the missing piece of the puzzle
flashed before her eyes. It wasn’t the act of killing that had
driven her over the edge, it was something that happened on her
fifteenth birthday. A big quinceanera had been out of the question,
but her foster mother let a few friends sleep over and the girls
gorged themselves on slasher flicks and cookie dough. Around
midnight, Marisol got up to pee. The shower curtain had rustled
behind her as she washed her hands.

“
Don’t be lame,” she’d said,
assuming it was one of her friends trying to scare her.

In the bathroom mirror’s reflection, she’d
watched as the curtain swished slowly to the side and a pale foot
streaked with tar-black mud stepped onto the bath mat. She’d turned
and caught just a quick glimpse of the grin on his face before he
grabbed her and slammed her head against the wall. When she came
to, her foster mother was shaking her. She’d tried to tell her what
she’d seen, but couldn’t get her bloodied mouth to form
words.

“
You don’t have to be afraid
anymore,” the boy said, snapping her back to the present. He leaned
back and slung one bare foot over the side of the canoe, dipping a
toe into the water. “I’ve forgiven you.”

“
This isn’t real,” she whispered to
herself.

He laughed. “Did you know this lake used to be
a granite quarry? You wouldn’t believe how deep it
goes.”

“
No! You’re not real,” she
screamed. Her voice echoed across the water.

“
It hasn’t been easy,” the boy
said, “but I’ve gotten by. I’ve got quite a collection down there.
It’s not just stray cats and dogs. Now I’ve got a few wayward kids
and unhappy campers. Even a drunk guy who wandered a little too far
from his campsite. But I get lonely because there’s no one down
there like me. That’s why I had to knock the truth back into
you.”

“
I’m not like you.”

He grinned. “Are you sure?”

She wanted to run but there was nowhere to go.
She was trapped in a canoe with something that was either a very
vivid hallucination or a monster she’d helped create.

“
I’m not going down there,” she
said. The boy didn’t react, just sat eerily still while he stared
at her. She could swear he was still sitting there, motionless,
when she felt his hands around her throat, squeezing the life out
of her.

She tried to shove him away, but his strength
was beyond human. Her muscular arms felt like useless twigs. She
thrashed but the boy held fast, tightening his grasp. Her vision
blurred as her lungs screamed for air.

Maybe it’s better this way. I’m a
killer, after all.
But she couldn’t stand the thought
of becoming one of the horrors at the bottom of that lake. She
shifted all of her weight to the left. The boy followed, tipping
the canoe and sending them both into the water. He wrapped his arms
around her neck and shoved her under. Below the lake’s sparkling
golden surface there was nothing but endless blackness. She could
hear dogs howling, cats mewling, birds screeching. And, in the
distance, children wailing.

Marisol’s nose filled with water and she came
up coughing before he shoved her back under.

“
Just give up,” the boy
said.

She threw her elbow as hard as she should,
nailing him square in the chest. He grunted and released his grasp.
She kicked away from him and felt his strong fingers grazing her
ankles. Then there was something else. Something soft brushed
against her arm just before a searing pain knocked the wind out of
her. A cloud of blood blossomed against the lake’s golden
surface.

Marisol screamed as an orange tabby missing an
ear and a tail tore into her shoulder. Something below snagged her
thigh, dug its incisors in and pulled her under.

More barking, mewling, and sobbing filled her
ears. She kicked harder. Even as she felt herself sinking, she
surged forward. She swam until she wore herself out and the
euphoria of oxygen deprivation took hold.

Oh well. I tried.

But she hit the bottom sooner than expected.
Instead of muck filled with God only knows, her hands caught
fistfuls of sand and pebbles. With all the strength she had left,
she pushed off the bottom and sucked in a breath of air. The boy’s
humming, growing louder by the second, pushed her forward. She
could still hear the determined splashing of a canoe paddle as she
dragged herself onto the beach, her arm a ragged, bloody
mess.

She hacked up strings of mucus, then retched
and vomited on the moist sand. Blood from her arm pooled on the
beach while the lake’s tiny waves hungrily lapped it up. When
Marisol rolled over, she saw a sapphire sky with a few golden
clouds reflected in water, still as a mirror, and a single,
unoccupied canoe floating by the shore. She winced as she hoisted
herself up and limped back toward the parking lot.

“
Jesus, what happened?” Brent asked
when she plunked down in the passenger’s seat.

“
Just drive, man. And don’t ever
let me come back here.”

4.
CLOWN

Tom
Rimer
, United
States

There
was a
clown standing at the end of Randy’s bed.

Anyone else, Randy knew, would have been terrified of the
sight. In the middle of the night, a seven-foot clown, regardless
of how much he was smiling, would scare the crap out of anybody.
For Randy, though, the grinning merry-maker
positioned
just beyond his exposed toes was nothing he
hadn’t seen before.

Randy had been
visited nightly by the clown for the last thirteen years. In the
early days, just after his fifth birthday, when he moved out of the
bedroom he shared with his older brother, he’d screamed for his
parents every time the clown appeared. In each instance, his
parents rushed in to him, but they never saw the gawking colossus
with the red nose, comically small pinwheel beanie, and painted-on
tears. The clown never disappeared as they entered the room. It
continued to stand and ponder him, cocking its head like a curious
puppy, even after his parents repeatedly explained that they didn’t
see anything and that he must have been having a very vivid dream.
Eventually, Randy gave up trying to tell his family what he was
seeing. He simply became used to the clown. It never hurt him,
touched him, or spoke. It simply was.

Randy got
older, started high school, and eventually spent more time sleeping
away from home. And, wherever Randy went, so did the clown. Still
standing. Still smiling. Make-up never fading.

Randy
remembered a camping trip he’d begrudgingly ventured on to The
Berkshires when he was in middle school. It was to be the first
night he’d spent away from his parents and (he had hoped) the
clown. He’d woken to the crack of thunder and the ripple of the
wind against his nylon tent. Fumbling for his flashlight, unable to
even see his hands, he knew the clown was there. He waited
patiently, and with the next flash of lightning, the grinning clown
face was illuminated, white and looming over Randy’s sleeping bag.
It couldn’t stand upright in the two-person pup tent, and was
awkwardly bent at the waist. That instance always stuck in Randy’s
memory because it was the first time Randy realized he’d never be
rid of it, no matter where he slept.

Another time, Randy fell asleep in a hospital room, keeping
watch on his sickly grandfather. His parents only left the room for
a few minutes to get some coffee, but being up past his bedtime,
Randy had been unable to keep his eyes open. He’d fallen asleep for
just a moment when the
beep-beep-beeping
of his Gramps’ heart monitor shook him awake. Randy lifted his
head and, behind the bouquet of “get well” balloons, the massive
bulk of the clown loomed. The balloons danced on the invisible
breath of the overhead vents and the clown’s eyes eventually made
contact with Randy’s. The clown never looked down at the shriveled
old man in the bed; he only stared through the balloons at Randy.
Just like he always did. The next morning, Randy’s Gramps
died.

The
clown was even with Randy to ring in the New Year once. He’d tried
to stay up with his older brother to watch the ball drop on
Dick Clark’s New Year’s
Rockin’ Eve
, long
after his parents had stumbled to bed. Though they’d both valiantly
fought the urge, the two brothers had passed out not long before
the chanting in Times Square started. Randy woke up, post
countdown, thanks to some one-hit wonder prancing around on stage
in a glittery leotard, and immediately saw the warped, fun-house
reflection on the TV screen.

The clown’s
painted face was lit up in marvelous pinks and greens, yet he
didn’t blink or seem to even register the celebration happening in
front of his foam nose. As always, it pondered Randy, the boy who
no longer cried at the sight of him and who for so long, had simply
accepted him.

And so, on
that night, when Randy was suddenly awakened with a painfully full
bladder, he had almost no reaction at finding the clown standing in
its usual spot. As Randy swung his legs off the bed, rubbing sleep
from his eyes, he noticed something was different about the clown.
In the thirteen years it had been visiting him, it had never
spoken. On that night, though, Randy watched the clown’s lips
twitch, and its tongue struggle to produce some kind of a sound.
There came a quiet crackling, like a snake slowly dragging itself
through a pile of sodden leaves, as the clown’s lungs expanded for
possibly the first time. Randy thought it was trying to say
something.

Instead of
going to the bathroom, Randy decided to wait. He wasn't just
curious what the clown might have to say, but he was, for the first
time in a long time, a little bit frightened.

Sure, the clown was nothing new, but Randy had become so used
to its presence that he barely registered
it
any more, seeing him like an old chair or a pile of
forgotten mail. That the clown was trying to speak was as startling
as it would have been if that chair or the old envelopes had opened
their own mouths and had started to talk.

So Randy
listened.

The clown’s
mouth continued to work at producing some kind of a voice, but
seemed unable to do so. After a while, the crackling sounds slowly
transformed into a low hiss, like an old gas valve had been forced
open. Randy tried to read the clown’s quivering lips, but could
only focus for so long before the sight made his gut go sour. He
realized he’d never stared so long and intently at the figure
standing at his feet, and doing so forced him to see what he had
never before seen.

The clown’s
painted-on tears were not painted on at all. He was crying. And the
expression that Randy had for so long assumed was a smile was
actually much closer to a grimace. Its lips, struggling to form
words, were split and leaking blood. Its tongue, slithering to
life, was nothing more than a rotting stump. Randy remained in bed,
a shiver creeping through his body, and pulled his blankets over
his feet.

The clown
stepped toward the bed.

Randy pulled
his feet away from the footboard and sat up.

The clown took
another halting step forward.

Randy squeezed
himself as far back on the bed as he could, his shoulder blades
scrunched against his headboard.

The clown
leaned forward and placed a hand on the end of Randy’s
mattress.

Randy looked
at the hand. Where he could see flesh poking through the dirty
white glove, he saw peeling skin and oozing sores. It moved closer
to him, into the moonlight, and Randy saw the hand was clutching a
large butcher knife.

The clown
dragged itself over the base-board and Randy felt the bedsprings
groan under its weight. Its eyes focused on him and it tried to
speak again. As its painted face pulled even with his, Randy
smelled the rancid rot of clown breath, and its sounds became more
recognizable as sobs. Then, the sobs turned to mournful
whispers.

“
I-i-i-i–”

The clown was
speaking to Randy.

“
A-a-a-m-m-m–”

Randy’s eyes
widened.

“
S-s-s-s-o-o-o-r-r-r-y.”