Darling (17 page)

delivery, and go back to his apartment. No one would ever know.

This was what his father would call a
Smart Thing
.

He put his car in gear and drove up the hill.

After scouting out the lobby and the pool area to make sure no one was out, he went back to the car and grabbed the bag. It was heavier than he thought it would be and the sudden fear that the bottom would split open in the hallway, spilling its contents all over the floor, took hold of him. He grabbed another bag from his trunk and slid the first one inside of it. He had a slightly easier time tying this one and he lugged it up the steps into the courtyard.

With both hands on it, it still strained his grip and pulled at his shoulders. He felt like his tendons would rip before he even made it out back. He stopped, tried to catch his breath, and lamented what horrible shape he was in.

He heaved the bag up, trying to get it over his shoulder, but it only made it to waist level. It swung back down and crashed into his shins. The momentum from the swing toppled him over onto his ass, the bag coming to rest in his lap.

“Fuck.”

He squirmed out from under it and stood. He gripped it again, gritted his teeth, and gave it everything he had. This time it swung up and over his shoulder, smacking into his back hard enough to make him stumble forward a few feet. He felt a sharp pain in his lower back that leaked around his hip into his thigh. He sucked a breath and took an awkward step forward. The pain confirmed his fear; he had pulled something.

Nothing to do about it now. He couldn’t leave the bag there. Just suck it up and get it over with.

He limped forward, past the statues smiling down at him, and into the lobby. He heard the elevator whirring and froze, unsure what to do. He panicked and rushed for the back doors.

He stumbled into the pool area. It was empty. The breeze blew a little harder, chilling the sweat on his brow and his arms. He inched past the pool and out into the field. If anyone saw him now, hunched over with a bag on his back, he knew he would look like Quasimodo, or Igor bringing his master fresh parts.

He made his way through the grass, slipping here and there on loose rocks and dirt, but never completely lost his footing. Each slip sent new waves of pain through his hip and back, and he yelped once, but kept pushing on. Twigs and nettles stuck to the bag, grabbed at it, tore little holes into it, as though the field itself tried to wrest a prize from him.

The moon was little more than a sliver in the sky and he could barely see the supermarket against the blackness of the woods ahead. He slowed a little, wondering where the concrete started, when his foot came down on something hard and raised. A curb. He almost lost his balance, the weight of the bag trying to drag him backwards into the stinging grip of the field, but he stayed upright.

He took a step onto the parking lot.

The busted lamp above him flickered to life.

He froze. Was someone here? He looked around, couldn’t see anyone, couldn’t hear anyone.

He was alone. The light must be on a motion sensor, like the one over his dad’s garage.

Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that eyes were on him. The light was far from comforting, even considering how dark it had been before. Now he was exposed. He whirled around and looked back at the pool area, certain someone watched him.

He didn’t see a soul. He chalked it up to nerves and approached the double doors leading into the store. The glass was clouded over and filthy with dirt. All he could see was a blurry darkness behind them. He stepped up to them and almost screamed when they opened.

Why did the building still have power?

He shook his head. It didn’t matter. He needed to throw the bag in and get the hell out of there.

He walked up to the edge of the doorway and peeked inside. It was black, blacker than any black he had ever seen. Cold seeped out from inside, colder than the breeze blowing around him. It reminded him of the chilly dampness of deep caves, like when his parents took them to Mammoth Cave eight or nine years ago. Deep, dark, icy, and impenetrable.

He tossed the bag inside. He thought he would hear it slap against the floor, see its shadow topple over, but he didn’t. There was no sound, no visual.

It was like the shadows swallowed the bag whole.

It didn’t feel right. He should grab the bag and get the hell out of there. Toss it into the woods, take it to some fast food restaurant’s dumpster, anywhere, just not there.

But he couldn’t bring himself to. If he had seen where it landed, maybe, but…

But what?

Maybe there are spiders, he told himself, trying to give a name to the fear he felt. Snakes. Rats. Crazy homeless people. Hell, even boards with rusty nails through them. It’s done. Leave.
Now.

He took two steps back. Three. Not able to take his eyes off of the darkness, as though he were expecting…

Expecting what?

When he was off of the sidewalk, the double doors slid together.

He turned and tried to run back through the field, but his back was little more than a knotted ball and agony shot through every nerve. He slowed to a fast limp and pushed his way through the grass. He didn’t look back until he was by the pool.

The light in the parking lot was still on.

He went in, climbed into the elevator, and rode up to his apartment. Once inside, he went straight to his room and shut the door. The place was dark and quiet. Dennis was either asleep or at Eileen’s again.

He remembered that he had left groceries in the trunk of his car, but didn’t care. Nothing he had bought would go bad by morning and he could bring it all in then. He just needed to lie down for a short while. He was tense and stressed and in pain and needed to rest.

He glanced out his window at the supermarket. The light was alive in the parking lot and he wondered what was wrong with it.

He closed his blinds and slunk down into his bed. Sleep enveloped him and he pushed all thoughts of Lucy and the supermarket from his mind. His utter exhaustion allowed him to rest without dreams until sunrise.

He would have had nightmares if he knew what he had done.

* * *

In the dark, it moved.

It had slept for so long, the comfort of oblivion too sweet a seduction to resist. It was so much easier to dream than to be.

Dreams were such powerful things.

And yet now, after such a long while, the consciousness stirred, the slumber threatening to fall away.

Sacrifice is sweet, as the Old Testament states in gory detail, but no sacrifice as sweet as that given freely, without demand or request.

It dreamed of simpler times, of light and beauty. It had destroyed that peace itself, by its own vain hand. Consumed by self-loathing, buried away in the dark to forget and be forgotten, this horrid dream of what was and what could have been made it cry out in its sleep, a cry that tore wide a hole its dreams had first whittled so long ago.

It calmed and sleep claimed it fully again.

But holes were funny things. Stab a hole in a water hose, for instance, and the pressure of the water over time will stretch the hole, carve it ever wider, until more and more water flows through, out of its protective barrier, spilling on the ground around it. Such a flood always starts with a single
drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Chapter Ten

A cold breeze tickled his feet. Dennis stirred, pulled them back inside the comfort of his sheets. His thoughts fought through the strange wilderness between awake and asleep.

He knew he had closed that window
.
His bladder ached and urged him to the bathroom. But Dennis was a stubborn sleeper, and instead rolled over onto his side to relieve the pressure.

He heard a low creak. It must be Mike, going to the toilet.

The thought barely formed before his consciousness sunk back down into the sleep. He tucked the sheet up to his neck and wiped a small bit of drool from his chin. The cotton was cool against his skin.

The breeze picked up, softly ruffling the sheet like caressing fingers.

Something creaked again.

The sound nudged him. Something in the room had changed, some subtle shift in the air pressure or the temperature. It gave him the distinct impression that someone else was in the room.

His limbs were heavy, his lids heavier, and so he told himself it was a remnant of a dream and resolved to go back to sleep. But the feeling itching the back of his skull was stubborn, a horrible feeling of violation telling him that someone’s eyes were on him while he slept.

Was he still dreaming?

That creak again.

This time he recognized it and his heartbeat tripled. His eyes were still closed but he was fully awake now.

It’s nothing, he told himself. The wind. He had forgotten and left the window open and the wind was blowing his mother’s rocking chair back and forth, back and forth, slowly, the way his mother used to rock while knitting or—

But he had closed the window. He was positive.

Another creak
.

He rolled over onto his back and opened his eyes. Aside from a single stripe of pale blue light that streaked across the ceiling, the room was almost as black as the back of his eyelids.

He rubbed his palms into his eyes. His bladder beat like a heart inside his pelvis. He fought himself up onto one elbow and yawned, scanned his room, saw nothing but dark. It took his eyes a moment to adjust.

When they did, he sucked in a sharp breath.

Someone was in the rocking chair.

He froze.

A part of him wanted to roll over, flip on the light, dispel the dark. But the signals died somewhere along the nerves between brain and muscles.

The chair was in shadow, its dark outline barely visible. The outline rose slightly on one of the arms, the shape of an elbow resting over the side. A head shaped lump of blackness leaned forward at the top with what had to be hair draping down the back of it.

His jacket. He always threw it on the back of the chair. That was what he was seeing. He almost laughed out loud. He had read in a psychology textbook that the human brain tried to make familiar shapes out of the unfamiliar, like seeing animals in clouds or faces in the natural contours of a rocky cliff.

The chair rocked forward. He looked to the window, knowing that seeing the drapes gently blowing would completely calm his nerves. They hung flat against the wall, still, like they were glued there. He waited for them to move.

And waited.

And waited.

The chair creaked as it rocked back.

Dennis pressed himself against his headboard. His breath died in his throat and a cold bead of sweat rolled down his nose. It hung from the tip for what seemed an eternity before plummeting into the dark.

“Who…who’s there?” Was that his voice? How did he force that out?

“I don’t know how I got here,” what should have been his jacket whispered. It was a low, raspy sound, the voice hollow and filled with static, like a vinyl recording of a depression-era radio program played through blown speakers. It sent chills rippling across his flesh like thousands of tiny spider legs scrambling over him. His bladder let go, flooding his pajama pants in warmth and soaking through into the sheets.

The dark shape rocked forward again and for the first time in his life he knew blind, unreasoning fear. It built in his gut and spread through his limbs and into the lump of matter at the base of his skull. He thought he knew how roaches must feel when the lights came on, or deer when a truck barreled down on them on a dark highway, or a mouse feeling the drip of warm saliva from a cat’s mouth.

His skin was cold, his sweat colder. His breath was short and turned to mist as it leaked from between his lips. The room was thick and malicious with silence, punctuated by the occasional creak of the rocking chair.

“I’ve missed you,” it said. Something in the pitch sounded vaguely feminine.

“…Mom?” He wasn’t sure what made him say it, but uttering it solidified his fear. A part of him thought of her funeral, of the way she had laid so peaceful in her coffin. She didn’t look like she was sleeping; no matter how many times people said that, there was no mistaking the unnatural stillness of her body or the brightness of the stage makeup painted on her face.

The shape in the rocking chair had the same stillness and, even though it lacked the brightness of the make-up, he was certain it was her.

“Mom?” he asked again.

The chair stopped.

The panic coursing through him took over. It forced his arm across the bed to tug on the little brass chain that hung below the shade. The lamp clicked to life and the room was flooded with warm, white light.

The rocking chair was empty except for the jacket draped over its back.

He blinked a few times. Rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. Yawned. He
had
been sleeping still. It was a nightmare. A powerful, vivid nightmare, but nothing more. With the lights on and the shadows gone, his mind found the idea of ghosts and creaking rocking chairs to be ridiculous.

He thought of Eileen’s nightmare and vowed to never tell her about his.

He stood and the wet leg of his pants stuck to his thigh. He hadn’t pissed the bed since he was five. He pressed his hand against the sheets and found that they were warm and damp as well. He ripped them off and threw them into the clothes hamper. His pajama pants and boxers followed.

He grabbed his bathrobe from the closet and slid it on. The belt was missing, probably wrapped up in the leg of a pair of jeans he washed it with, and so he clutched it closed with one hand. He opened his bedroom door and peered out into the darkness of the living room. He paused, struck with the idea that someone was out there, sitting on the couch or standing in the corner, the shadows draped over them like a cloak, hiding them until Dennis stepped out and then—